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Roy Glashan's Library
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A lonely mill, a shuttered house, and a river that seems to brood over old sorrows—"The Haunted River" draws you into Charlotte Riddell's most atmospheric mystery, where two devoted sisters, searching for a modest home, stumble instead upon a place steeped in ruin, silence, and an unspoken tragedy. As they wander through weed-choked gardens, deserted rooms, and the eerie stillness of the abandoned mill, hints of the past begin to surface: a prosperous family undone, a miller whose fate was sealed on a bitter winter night, and a ghost story whispered by those too frightened to approach after dark. What begins as a hopeful quest for refuge becomes an unsettling encounter with a landscape saturated in memory—inviting the reader to follow the sisters deeper into the secrets that cling to the river's edge.
HOW we came to live there was in this wise.
The old story, eternally old, eternally new, of death and ruin, had been wrought out for our disadvantage amongst the Yorkshire moors; and thus it happened that at the beginning of the year 18—, Georgie and I found ourselves in London, frequenting house-agents' offices in search of a detached residence, and fearing we should never meet with what we wanted within a reasonable distance of the metropolis.
For there are residences and residences; and the sort of habitation we had mentally in our view differed materially from the kind of place people sent us to look at.
We did not know exactly at first what Londoners understand by a detached house, but we soon learnt.
They mean a building not attached to any other, it is true; but they mean also a house overlooked possibly, and a garden overlooked certainly, a front entrance commanded by the eyes of all the neighbours, and with no privacy even in the drawing-room worth mentioning.
In fact, the phrase at once conjures up before the Cockney imagination the Cit's usual box at Streatham, Clapham, Peckham, or Clapton—the desirable villa residence, built of half-burnt bricks, road mud, green timber, and stucco—trim and tidy, brand-new, cold and comfortless—with a small, arid desert at the rear called a garden, with a little fence to right and left, dividing its borders from those of next door—with a morsel of green in front of each window, adorned probably by a puzzle-monkey and a stone vase, or a hungry-looking flower-bed laid out as an open tart, or arranged to resemble a dish of trifle.
The only other item required to render this detached habitation a paradise is a summer-house designed after the fashion of a booth in a suburban tea-garden, in which the happy tenant can smoke late of a summer's evening, and the children carry their toys and quarrel to their hearts' content on a wet day.
On the other hand, what we wanted was a cottage, no matter how small, surrounded by its own little territory, and isolated, to all practical intents and purposes, from its kind.
Whether it were one or two-story—whether it were thatched or slated—whether we had to enter the living rooms through the kitchen, or reach the hall door through the parlour, signified not a bit.
If, to use the graphic expression of an Irish lady, we were obliged to "open the door to put on our stockings," seemed a matter of small consequence so long as out of doors we had some elbow-room, some walk, some grass-plot we could pace up and down without our movements being observed from a back window or the steps leading to a neighbour's balcony.
Moorland, common, farm, heath, it signified not, so long as the rent we paid gave us the free use of "plenty of out of doors;" but neither on moorland, common, farm, nor heath, could we find anything like what we wanted at anything like a rent we could afford to pay.
North, east, south, and west, we sought for some suitable abode. We advertised, we answered advertisements; we felt we must be getting known at railway-stations, and we could not help noticing that estate-agents fought shy of giving us "orders to view."
"The sort of thing you require, madam," said a managing clerk one day, "can only be had a few hundred miles from London. You will never find a place such as you indicate, at the rent you propose as a limit, within easy distance of the metropolis. If a place of the kind ever existed within an hour of town, it has been snapped up long ago. In all my experience, I can only say I never met with it. Trouble, madam! Oh, pray do not mention that! No trouble—most happy, I am sure. Only regret we have nothing on our books, and are not likely to have anything. What I was about to advise was, that if you could fix upon a locality—say, in Wales, or Cornwall, or Sark (now, Sark is not a bad place! for you, I should imagine, just the thing), or Scotland, or Ireland, or Cumberland, or—or, in fact, anywhere a little remote—you should go down there, take lodgings, and look about you. You would be certain to find something; but places of that kind do not come into our hands—they would not pay for advertising. Assure you, I feel really grieved that we have not had the pleasure of finding you a residence. Lovely place to be sold tomorrow; quite what you would appreciate, if matters had all been otherwise. The sweetest place! Beautiful house, splendid gardens, and one hundred acres of land! In strict confidence, I believe that estate will go for an old song—eighteen thousand or thereabouts. Well, well! as you very truly remark"—we had not uttered a syllable—"it is not everyone who has eighteen thousand pounds lying loose in his waistcoat pocket. I only wish you had, ladies; for this is a property I can recommend. If you do not meet with anything to suit you, perhaps you will look round again. We might have something, though I fear it is not likely. No, no! Pray do not say another word. Only too delighted if we could have done anything for you. Good morning."
"My dear Georgie," I remarked to my sister, a week later on, as I took off my bonnet after another fruitless expedition, "we must give it up, I am afraid. All this gadding about costs money and wastes time. We had better look out for a little house in Camden or Kentish Town, and pitch our tent amongst bricks and mortar at once. It must come to that eventually, for I cannot go hundreds of miles from London, and no house such as we want is to be had within fifty miles, at any rate."
"Poor old Peg, you are tired as tired can be," remarked my pretty sister, who, seated upon our mutual bed, surveyed me quite dispassionately from the vantage grounds of coolness and beauty the while I laved, and brushed, and talked.
"Tired! I should think I am tired," was the rejoinder; "and so would you have been had you walked along miles of dusty roads, been scorched by the heat, aggravated by care-takers, robbed by fly-drivers, and—"
"Come and have some tea," suggested Georgie.
Never, I think, never since the world began did two sisters so love each other as Georgie and myself; and yet we are not "own" sisters. Georgie's mother was not my mother; I am years older and ever so much plainer than the girl Benjamin of my father's later life; but I love her—I have always loved her—I shall go on loving her till many things cease for me altogether.
Aye, my dear, both our mothers died while we were yet too young to know what for us died with them; and when I was eight, and you a baby in arms, we foregathered, as the Scotch say, and our friendship—I use the word in its highest, noblest sense—has survived all sorts of shoals and hidden dangers—prosperity, adversity, the flattery of acquaintances, the coldness of so-called friends.
We have been rich, we have been poor, we have been joyous, we have been sorrowful together.
In the English language there is no word which should have power to destroy our affection for one another.
I love you, dear. I have always loved you; I always shall; though you will call me Peg—a name I utterly abhor.
"Come and have some tea, then," says my pretty sister, putting her soft hand in mine, and rubbing her sweet face against my cheek; and, as usual, I succumb and obey.
As Georgie well knows, tea exercises upon me a benignant influence.
Were I a lion before partaking of one soothing cup, I should be a lamb before a second could be offered.
The crafty little witch is so well aware of the fact that, even to this day, she manages me as she manages her husband—with pleasant words and a lure of the thing we most delight in.
"Are you good and Christian now, Peg?" asked she of the lovely face, when I had finished my tea and the account of my adventures—results arrived at simultaneously.
"I am always good and always Christian," I answered, not feeling, by the way, at all sure of being either. "What is it you want, Georgie? So much coaxing must be intended as a preliminary to persuasion."
"You are right, as usual, Peg. Let us make one journey more. There is a house advertised in today's paper that I feel satisfied is the very place we have been looking for."
"Now, my dear—"
"Now, Peg—"
"How often before have you felt the same conviction?"
"Not the same conviction; not the absolute certainty, at all events, which possesses me that this cottage is the cottage which has been standing vacant for us, possibly for years."
"Oh!" I exclaimed.
"Listen to what the advertisement says," entreated my sister. "'To be let on lease or otherwise, a detached cottage, containing three sitting and four bedrooms, kitchen, wash-house, good garden, and paddock—altogether about 1 ½ acres'"
"What a capacious cottage it must be!" I interrupted.
"Do be quiet, captious critic. 'Within ten minutes' walk of Maytree Station, whence Waterloo Station is reached in three-quarters of an hour. Pump of excellent water. Taxes low. Rent £25. For address, apply to Mr. Gridge, Station-master, Maytree.'
"Now, that," said my sister, as she concluded, "is, I am satisfied, the place we have been in search of. Let us go and see it."
"But, Georgie, consider," I remonstrated, "it will cost us ten shillings, at the very least; and only think of all the ten shillings we have spent on these wild-goose chases. We are only losing valuable time and wasting money we ought to be saving. Believe me, we had far better make up our minds at once to a house in a row, or one of a pair. We shall be able to make a comfortable home for ourselves even amongst bricks and mortar, never fear."
For a moment the bright face clouded, the lovely eyes dimmed; but then Georgie mastering her disappointment, said bravely:
"Don't mind my folly, Peg. If we have to live in town, I will try to think town delightful; but humour my fancy about this Maytree place. If it should prove unsuitable, I will not speak about the country again. Perhaps, after all, London would be best for us; but, still, it is such a change—it does seem a little hard after dear old Grangedale."
"It does," I agreed, feeling the change for her as I had never felt it for myself; "and I would never cross your fancy did the £ s. d. not obtrude itself. Each journey we take seems but so much money thrown away. Half a sovereign more, however, cannot make much difference; so we will go to Maytree, and see this wonderful cottage tomorrow."
"Not tomorrow," she entreated; "you are tired and out of sorts, and—"
"And you think that might affect my estimate of the house containing a garden and paddock," I laughed. "No, my dear, I am not so foolish as all that comes to. If you like the place and the neighbourhood, we will take the house. Make your mind quite easy on that point."
"How you spoil me, Peg."
"I am afraid I do, Georgie. And now let us see where Maytree is."
The very next forenoon we were travelling down the South Western line, through the fair, serene county of Surrey, so dear to the hearts of Londoners, for which, indeed, every Londoner seems to entertain a passionate and, to my mind, unaccountable attachment.
Well, it is as difficult to assign any reason for a man's love for one description of scenery, as for his infatuation for one style of beauty in woman.
So far as I am concerned, all I can say is, there are counties in England, and near the great metropolis also, I consider as lovely as tender, winsome Surrey; but that has nothing to do with this story!
We found Maytree a dull, quiet, unromantic station.
As a rule, the stations on the South Western line have nothing specially interesting in their appearance; and Maytree, spite its rural name, did not present tree or flower or shrub for our contemplation.
Had, in fact, a slice from one of the Vauxhall platforms been sent down by goods-train and set up in a yard well strewed over with rough and unpleasant gravel, the result could not have looked less like the country than the place which was our destination.
In blank disappointment, Georgie stared about her, while I, stepping up to the station-master, who chanced to be on the platform, questioned him about the advertisement which had brought us to Maytree.
At first he looked aggrieved, then perplexed; but light dawning upon him, he at length said,
"Oh! I know. You mean Holly Cottage—it is straight down the road. You can't miss it. Here, Jim, you are going that way; show these ladies Donaldson's place—the key is next door, at Mrs. Gibbs's. If you just mention my name, she will let you have it," he added, speaking to us.
What an arid bit of road that was along which Jim, evidently unversed in the usages of polite society, preceded us!
Building operations had been going on near the station, and the highway—naturally composed of sand—was plentifully strewed with pieces of broken brick, over which we picked our steps gingerly.
On our right hand were the "carcases"—that is, I believe, the correct and technical expression—of various shops and houses in a more or less forward state of incompleteness; while on the left lay scrubby hedgerows, dusty as to foliage, meagre as to undergrowth, not a twig in their length and breadth reaching higher than one's waist.
"Cheer up," I whispered to Georgie; "roads near a station are always like this."
"What horrid roads they must be, then!" answered my sister.
Nevertheless we persevered in our intention, Jim, shod in very heavy boots, tramping on in front, and leaving behind for our benefit a number of odours in which those of an ill-kept farm-yard, corduroy, tobacco, and mortar were most prominent.
Certainly it was a hideous thoroughfare. I did not like to look at Georgie—poor disappointed Georgie, as, under a broiling sun, we plodded along a road destitute of grass, beauty, or promise, so kept my eyes fastened upon Jim, and took such a mental photograph of every stain and patch in that young fellow's garments, that he has really proved a mine of wealth to me in the way of reproduction.
"There be Donaldson's," said our guide at last, pointing an extremely dirty finger towards a low, new, mean-looking house, standing in its own little garden, and flanked to right and left by a smithy and a carpenter's workshop.
The shrubs in the garden looked as if they had been planted about half an hour, and the very mortar stood out from between the bricks as if expostulating about being presented in all its juvenile nakedness to a criticising public.
"Need we go in?" asked Georgie, faintly—poor, pretty Georgie, who had so pinned her faith to that advertisement!
"I think we may as well see it through," I answered.
Accordingly, after recompensing Jim, who being evidently unaccustomed to a dole of more than the value of a pint of inferior ale, at once touched his hat and waxed gracious exceedingly, we proceeded to the residence of Mrs. Gibbs, mentioned Mr. Gridge's name, and were at once presented with the right of entrée to Donaldson's Holly Cottage.
For myself, having expected nothing, I was not disappointed.
I unlocked the front door, went over the cottage, paced the garden, looked out upon the paddock, and then returned to Georgie, who stood by a side-window disconsolately surveying some gigantic sun-flowers.
"Peg," she said, solemnly, "I am disgusted. I should like to make Donaldson refund our fare and the value of your lost day; but as that is impossible, let us take the next train back to town, and secure the first house we see at a possible rent in a decently respectable street. I only wish Mr. Donaldson were here, that I might tell him what I think of his cottage and his advertisement."
I put my hands on her shoulders—Georgie was a little apt to be impetuous—a quality, indeed, she retains to this hour, and said:
"My dear, be just; look around. Wherein has Donaldson deceived us? Is not the cottage detached—is there not the one acre and a half of land? For gardening purposes is not the garden admirably adapted? The place certainly does not realize our imaginings, but is that the fault of Donaldson? Don't you see, Georgie, that we have been running after an idea—and—"
"We had better give up the race."
"I fancy we must. But as we have gone to some expense this morning, let us explore the neighbourhood—let us try to obtain some return for our money. We may just as well make a day of it, and see all that there is to be seen round and about."
"You dear old darling!" said my sister, slipping her hand around my arm.
Ah! Georgie, how good God was when, though He took many, many other blessings away, He left me you.
THE farther we got from the station, the prettier became the road.
Very soon we had left behind the unfinished houses, the nursery grounds, the mean shops, the paltry cottages, and found ourselves in a rich valley, where the grass grew long and thick, where meadow sweet scented the air, where the lark sang high and clear, where the note of the corn-crake seemed to make silence audible, where everything was so calm and peaceful that Georgie's face clouded at the thought of returning to dusty streets, and small rooms, and the close, confined atmosphere of our London lodgings.
For the home which was home to us no longer had been spacious and beautiful; set in goodly grounds, surrounded by many a fair acre of park, and wood, and water; and though neither of us was so cowardly as to repine for the loss of mere material advantages, still we could not help feeling the change from wealth in the country to poverty in the town.
"This is delicious, Peg, isn't it?" said my sister, standing quite still, and drawing in a long breath of sweet, pure undefiled air. "How I wish we could stay here forever."
"Perhaps you would like to take Mr. Donaldson's desirable residence," I suggested, laughing; but she shook her head.
"I am afraid, dear, it must be town for us after all As you rightly say, this eternal house-hunting means loss of time, and loss of money. I mean to be good and contented now. I shall not look at another advertisement of a house to let, and you shall not hear another word from me in disparagement of the great metropolis."
I looked at her winsome face, and remembering the brilliant future I had planned for her, the proud delight our dead father had taken in her beauty, and her winning, graceful ways, there came over me the sad, sick feeling, which often seemed to weigh down my heart, when I contrasted all that now appeared possible with what had once been well nigh certain.
As she spoke we were standing near a lane or by-road diverging from the highway.
It seemed to be a very pretty road, shaded by arching trees, and crossed by a trickling stream, spanned by a tiny foot-bridge, rustic and picturesque to an extent.
"Let us go down there," suggested my sister, and so, quite idly and unconscious of what we were doing, we turned aside from the main road, and went forward to meet our fate.
If I had known all that would come of setting our faces towards that bridge, could I have gone on?
Hardly, I think.
Though years have come, and years have departed, and the past, with its terror and horror, is replaced by a bright and happy present, there are times when I cannot bear to be alone—when the old dread and fright return, and are too much for me—when I could scream if anyone came near shod with silence—when if I am spoken to or touched by a person approaching unawares, I have to constrain myself, or I should shriek aloud.
It was not any sudden alarm that produced this; it was an hourly, daily wear and tear that destroyed my nervous system, and which, while producing at the time apparently little effect, really undermined my constitution and sapped my courage.
For I am not courageous now.
I, who once feared neither burglar nor ghost, dread the darkness as if it were an enemy—see spectres in the fitful shadows, and feel my heart beat nervously, whenever the slightest unwonted noise breaks the stillness of the night watches.
A lovely road, certainly.
Elm trees are not plentiful in some parts of Surrey, but they bordered that lane, and their branches, interlacing, formed a roof of vivid green above our heads.
It was leafy June, and the wild roses were blossoming in the hedgerows, while the starry flowers of the convolvulus covered the hawthorn trees, which had lost their glory of flower and fragrance.
Even the ditches by the wayside were masses of almost tropical luxuriance and beauty.
Docks and nettles—the bane and the antidote—massed themselves together; tansy was knotting itself for flower. Ragged Robin was running in and about the beech hedge, dotted at intervals by the elm trees, and every now and then a vivid bit of colour was supplied by the gorse which is never out of blossom, save when kissing is out of fashion.
It was exquisite—the calmness, the brooding peace, the soft Surrey air, the blue sky seen at intervals through a tracery of greenery, the ripple of the tiny stream over the stones, the plash of a larger body of water in the distance; my own soul seemed filled with the beauty of the place, while Georgie could only squeeze my hand at intervals, to express her delight by a silence more eloquent than words.
After a little time the way widened; to right and left there began to stretch patches of grass land by the road-side.
The elm trees ceased to shade us; we no longer walked beside the ditches filled with rank vegetation, and we could see over the hedgerows a land of plenty, of meadows where the grass grew knee-deep, of cornfields where the green wheat was dotted with brilliant poppies, stretching away as far as the eye could follow.
Closer came the regular plash, plash, of the water.
We could not see it, but the sound seemed to draw us onward.
"There must be a river not far off. That is the noise of a weir," said my sister; but she was wrong as to her latter conjecture.
All at once the road took a sudden bend, and then we found that the sound we had heard was the waste water from a mill-pond, rushing down a paved incline into an artificial course which had been made for it.
As for the mill, it was closed, falling to decay, in parts roofless—in all places rotten—silent, neglected.
Still and useless was the broken wheel, no bucket of which could have held water.
An uprooted willow-tree lay across the stream, and from the opposite bank some solitary pines, their crests twisted northward with the force of the south winds, looked sombrely upon the desolation which had been wrought.
Years must have passed since a sack of wheat was carried through those closed doors.
The very spirit of loneliness seemed to pervade the place.
There was not a child, a dog, or any other living creature, besides ourselves and a few cows, within earshot of the spot.
I have often sketched it since.
From many points of view the old mill figures in various landscapes the public is good enough to admire; but I have never been able to reproduce to my own satisfaction, or to convey to the mind of the spectator, even a portion of the brooding mystery which, on first seeing the place, seemed to me to hang over it.
"What an eerie spot!" remarked my sister, after we had looked at the rushing water, and the sad pine-trees, and the broken wheel, and the silent mill, for many minutes in silence. "Don't let us stand here any longer, Peg;" and she slipped her hand again within my arm, and led me forward.
"It is an eerie spot," I agreed. "What tale is there attached to it, I wonder?"
"Only that the miller made his fortune, and left off grinding, most likely," she answered, laughing. "But look, Peg, there is a house to let. Is not that sufficiently detached to meet your views?"
"Yes; and so is Windsor Castle, no doubt," was my scoffing reply; for the place towards which Georgie's forefinger pointed was, indeed, one of those residences which are described in house-agents' advertisements as "suitable for a gentleman of position."
Here was no modest cottage with garden fenced roughly in from a waste of moorland—no small house built on the side of a lonely moor, but a proper edifice enclosed by brick walls and well-grown hedges, with glimpses of conservatories, with stacks of chimneys, with yards and stabling, and all those other appurtenances which say as plainly as inanimate objects can sometimes speak:
"This is no place for poor people—a long rent is asked for this most desirable residence, which requires, in addition, a handsome income to keep it up."
"This residence," however, had clearly not been kept up; the brick walls wanted pointing, the fences tarring, the moss scraping from the roofs of the outbuildings, the branches of the overhanging trees sawing off, the weeds clearing away from the edges of the footpath.
The very board on which appeared the notice "To be let" was rotten, and had shifted from its position, whilst the paint of the lettering had cracked and peeled till the statement was almost illegible.
The entrance-gates, which were high and closely boarded, had evidently not been opened for a considerable period; but by standing on tiptoe, and looking over a portion of the wall where parts of the coping was broken down, we managed to get a sight of the house, a square edifice only two stories high, with a broad veranda shading the lower rooms upon two sides.
Above and below, the windows were French, opening to the floor.
On the drive grass was growing; in fact, it was difficult to say where the gravel began and the lawn ended.
Closed and shuttered were the casements, silent as the grave the house.
Not a curl of smoke issued from one of the chimneys; not a trace of life appeared about the premises.
Under the blue sky of that bright June day, the old house, where once upon a time children must have laughed and lovers whispered soft nothings, stood desolate.
To me there has always been something sad exceedingly about the aspect of an empty house.
People exist, I am told, indeed I am aware, who, the moment they see vacant rooms and uncurtained windows, at once enter into a calculation as to the number of yards of carpet and lengths of drapery necessary to cover the floors and festoon the curtains; but to my sorrow, my extreme sorrow, my order of mind is different.
To a vivid imagination and sympathising soul, what are the carpets, and the hangings, and the furniture, and the drapery, and the napery of any house on earth?
'Tis the people that have lived in the house—filled it with joy and sorrow, with smiles and tears, with the tragedy and comedy of life—who supply the interest; the people that have loved and rejoiced and sorrowed and died, or gone away and left the old home desolate, like some deserted human being.
We looked at the house silently for a little time; then espying a door ajar in the fence, we pushed it open and entered the grounds.
For their size they were simply lovely.
Water, water everywhere—gardens sloping down to a clear, glassy river—lawns reflected in the limpid mirror.
Roses hanging over the stream, and swaying lightly backwards and forwards, as if moved by the sight of their own beauty.
Willow-trees dipping their branches in the flood—not a large place; afterwards we found the whole area enclosed was something under three acres, but so situated and so arranged as to give the idea of greater extent.
We had noticed that the road took another abrupt turn just beyond the entrance-gates—a turn so abrupt, in fact, that at first one might have imagined the house was built across the end of the highway.
Once in the gardens, we discovered the reason for this—viz., that the river took a sudden bend immediately behind the outbuildings.
On one side the premises were thus entirely bounded by water, while the mill-stream, diverted from its original source at a higher level further up the river, came flowing down a channel cut for it through the garden, thus, after a fashion, forming an island on which the mill and house were situated.
Yes, it was lovely.
What though the roses bloomed in the midst of weeds—what though sunflowers flared under the apple-trees laden with fruit—what though the globe artichoke had grown into a giant shrub, and was opening its lively bloom amid the sweet peas and convolvuli which were climbing over it—what though the docks beside the mill-stream were like palm in their stately growth and deep rich foliage?
The place was beautiful, exceedingly; more beautiful to my eyes than it ever seemed with the grass close-mown, and the weeds destroyed, and the sunflowers grubbed up, and the smooth hand of civilization and cultivation passed over the glorious picturesqueness, the prodigal generosity, the profuse wealth of vegetation in which, when Nature once says, "This land shall be covered with greenery," the kind mother revels.
"When you have made your fortune, Peg, we will rent this place," said my sister, breaking the silence at length.
"When the prince comes, Georgie, he shall buy it, and you must, both of you, make me free of a couple of rooms."
"If the prince mean to do one half of the things you are always planning for him to execute, I wish he would come at once," said Georgie, without a blush or the faintest sign of shamefacedness.
She was heart-whole, this sister of mine, and the prince existed solely in my own hope and imagination.
With all my soul I trusted he would come while she was young and fair.
I wanted him.
I longed for the lover—good, rich, handsome, clever, devoted, who should rescue my darling from the sordid life so unsuited for one like her, and transplant my flower from amongst the stinging nettles and pricking thorns to a soil where the graces and the beauties of her mind and body might have scope full and free for development.
For me there could be no prince forever; not merely was I that fatal eight years older than my sister, and plain, so that beside her I looked as delft when contrasted against porcelain; but there was a story in my past—a little story that may seem small and poor enough to you who read, but which to me meant the dimming of life's sunshine through all the years to come.
I was young when it all happened—only seventeen; but I loved him with a depth, an entirety, and a constancy which I know is rare at any age.
We had been brought up almost together, for he was my cousin, and my father looked upon him almost as his own son. He it was who would have succeeded to the broad lands and the fair acres of our Yorkshire home had he lived.
In these three words you have the story.
He was young; he was full of life and spirits; he longed to see the worlds beyond the ocean, and he returned to us no more.
I can see him now, my boy lover—for he was but a boy—his blue eyes full of tears, his lips wearing a forced smile, the fair, uncovered locks of his curly hair, glistening like gold in the sunshine, holding me in his arms the morning he left, and whispering: "Be true, Maggie, till I come back."
And he never came back; from the day he sailed we never heard tale nor tiding of his fate.
The vessel never entered port after it left England, and he—well, he was but one of many who were waited for, prayed for, longed for, hoped for, and at last given up as lost.
Ah! no, he never came back.
There is more vitality in the bunch of wild flowers he gathered for me the last evening we walked together over the moors, and that now lie withered and colourless in my desk, than in the blue eyes which were so clear and frank; in the cheeks still smooth as those of a girl; in the voice whose every tone was familiar to me; in the hands that used to hold mine; in the heart once so warm, now colder than Greenland's snows.
I have been true to you, and the love which never changed nor grew weary is as fresh in its intensity, as keen in the bitterness of its anguish as on the bright summer's morning when though you tried to bear up bravely, you almost broke down, and said, in the dear voice so long silent—ah! so long—
"Be true to me, Maggie, till I come back."
WE had almost reached the limit of the flower garden, and were approaching the low fence, which, covered with climbers and creepers, divided the ornamental from the useful portion of the grounds, when we were met by a woman coming through a little gate formed of trellis-work, who carried some cabbages in her hand, and who started nervously when she perceived our presence.
Recovering herself, she curtsied, and would have passed on, but I stopped her, saying:
"I fear we are trespassing, and have alarmed you."
"Oh! you are quite welcome," she answered. "I was frightened just for the minute. I didn't hear you coming, and it is but seldom we see strangers so far down the lane. I thought perhaps, too, you might have come to see the house, and I was just cutting a cabbage. These are all going to waste now."
I looked around the place.
Could it be possible there was anyone careful enough to consider whether the vegetables were gathered or not?
From the woman's manner I decided that there was, and yet it seemed incredible in the face of such utter neglect, such wonderful wildness.
"The place does not seem to have had much money spent upon it lately," I remarked, more in order to say something than from any other cause.
"Money!" repeated the woman, scornfully; "the master's the wrong sort for that. He'd let the wood rot before he would let my husband spend sixpence for paint, unless it was out of his own wages. No; there ain't much spend about him."
"But surely he is very foolish," interposed Georgie. "It is such a pity to see so sweet a spot going to wreck and ruin; besides, it would let sooner if it were in good repair."
"I don't think it will let in a hurry," said the woman. "At first there used to be plenty of gentlefolk come to see it, but they didn't like the loneliness or the amount of water, or the boats passing (they used to pass up here once), or the rooms was too small, or the ceilings too low; there was always something they didn't like, and so the master at last wouldn't advertise it in the papers no more, and it is quite a rarity for anybody to ask to go over. Perhaps, ladies, you would like to take a look through the house."
"If not giving you too much trouble," I was beginning, when she interrupted me.
"As for that, it aren't no trouble, if you don't mind going over by yourselves, and only hanging up the key again when you come out. I must go home to get my husband's dinner. He works on the line, and he'll be back shortly. I'll just unlock the door, and then you can go where you please and take your time."
"I suppose the owner asks a very high rent?" said Georgie, interrogatively, probably with a prospective eye to the time when I should have made my fortune.
"Well, Miss, it do sound a tidyish bit of money, but I have heard folk say that to anybody as would care to live in it, the place is dirt-cheap. Fifty pounds a year the master told my husband he would take. He used to ask more than that after he first left it."
Georgie squeezed my hand, and I confess my own pulses beat quicker.
Fifty pounds a year was much more than I had intended to expend upon rent; but if there were not some mistake, about which my mind misgave me, this house, with its productive gardens, its sloping lawns, its drooping willows, its delicious quiet, its wealth of waters, should be ours.
Yes; here Georgie would not feel the change from wealth to poverty as she had done in our confined London lodgings; here the roses which had faded a little from her cheeks would bloom once more; here, whatever private economies we might have to practise, we should retain some, at all events, of the externals of a better time; here, last also, but by no means least, I should find space, leisure, rest, and light in which to pursue the art that was to provide us with food and shelter and clothing in the days to come, when the small sum of money I possessed through my mother must be at length exhausted, and nothing save the one talent vouchsafed to me remained between us and starvation.
It may save perplexity hereafter if I say at once I was then and am now an artist.
From my childhood I possessed a certain gift of reproducing what my eyes beheld, and had a passion for doing so.
In the merest spirit of indulgence, without the faintest foreboding that one day I should have to turn to brush and palette for a subsistence, my father permitted me to cultivate such genius as had been given me to the uttermost.
I learned from such instructors as were available.
We travelled—we haunted old collections, we visited churches and galleries and palaces, till the very spirit of painting seemed to enter into my life.
Through all the time of my brief happiness, through all the weary time when I looked for the return of the lover who never came back, when I was glad, when I was sorry, this one talent stood my friend.
And thus it came about that when we were thrown almost penniless—by comparison with what had been—on the world, the first idea which occurred to me was—
"I have a means of livelihood within my reach if I like to use it. I have painted for my pleasure; I must now paint for profit."
As I thought, so I determined.
Now that our father was dead, our fortune shattered, our home in the hands of a stranger, little remained to tie us to our birthplace.
Yet still it had been our birthplace, and we had friends there true and tried, who looked upon it as right and natural that we should stay amongst them, and in the neighbourhood which had known our prosperity be safe and respected in our adversity.
It is a mistaken sentiment, I fancy, to continue under altered circumstances where old traditions bind one, but I felt chary of expressing this opinion; and it was only when we were fairly away upon what ostensibly seemed a mere visit to London that I summoned sufficient courage to say we should return as permanent residents to the old familiar haunts no more.
Many friends were offended, some hurt—all astonished at our foolhardiness. At least, as most were candid enough to point out, we had left our acknowledged position behind us.
As the remembered daughters of Grangedale, we should always have been received at the best houses, received invitations to parties, been certain of society; but in any other district who would know or care who our father had been, or remember in our poverty we were once looked upon as heiresses?
There was the curate who had already placed himself—his stipend, his correct ear for music, and his hundred a year allowed by an elder brother—quite at my disposal.
There was Sir Roger Newmarket, who only wanted the slightest word of encouragement to "enter" for Georgie, and make her free of his hall, his stables, his fortune, his cellar, his dogs, and the holy state of matrimony, from which already he had divorced one wife, and might, sensible men hinted, find means to divorce another.
There was old Mrs. Trumpington, who asked me to reside with her, "as an equal," which meant I was to receive no payment for any services I might render, and passe Lady Ramdon, who wanted to take Georgie with her to town in the season, that she might provide a new attraction—sorely needed—to her house.
These, and other things of the same sort, were, as our friends justly pointed out, advantages which did not fall in the way of most girls, and they entreated us to pause ere relinquishing them.
"As to your idea of making money by painting," wrote one adviser, "I really am astonished that so-otherwise-sensible a person should have permitted herself to entertain such a delusion. Your pictures were certainly very pretty, and nice, and all that sort of thing, but when you remember that men who have devoted their lives to this 'profession,' as it is now called, are only able to earn bread and cheese, you cannot imagine that you, who, as Mrs. Trumpington says, are ignorant of the very rudiments of the art, will make enough even to purchase your materials. Reflect, my dear, ere reflection be too late; and if you still persist in severing yourself from all your friends, at least do not be so self-willed and selfish as to drag Georgina down with you into the pit you are digging."
All of which would have been hard on me had I not felt pretty sure of ultimately succeeding, and possessed reasons for my faith, because Mrs. Trumpington and the writer had been amongst the most audacious of my flatterers.
Mrs. Trumpington indeed once went so far as to say a little moorland study I was engaged upon when she called, bleak, grey, sad, and lonely, "might have been done by Rubens," and it was discouraging to know that so profound a criticism had its origin in the flimsiest spirit of polite compliment!
Before stating our intentions, however, I had taken the precaution of surveying the London field of operations, and knew I could make something more than "would supply me with materials," and therefore if the opinion of our friends was in its very frankness trying, the faith which was in us enabled Georgie and myself to smile genuinely, if sadly, at the advice which was so practically useless, even though kindly intended.
Our friends thought us rash simpletons, and perforce we had to hear the expressions of their opinions to that effect.
Was there ever a man or a woman yet, I wonder, who, having the ability to strike out a course for him or herself, and the will to support that ability, has not been compelled in like manner to stand firm, lest the power of the criticism which really means, "After all you are a very poor, feeble creature, clever and wise though you consider yourself," should prove strong enough to undermine convictions that, formed almost unconsciously, in silence and in solitude, after long deliberation and weary mental argument, are destined sooner or later to bear much fruit.
I had known how it would be perfectly, and taken up a coign of vantage before declaring my intentions.
I was strong to fight, patient to wait, confident in my own powers, but I was weak to argue.
That was the defenceless part of my armour; through it a child might have killed the most valiant of my intentions dead with a single thrust.
Accordingly I did not argue; I accepted the criticisms on my want of capacity resignedly, and simply stating I meant to "try my fortune," made up in obstinacy what I felt I lacked in decision.
"You will be back amongst us before the end of the year," was the encouraging prophecy with which one letter concluded, but the prophecy proved false.
The story I have to tell commenced for us on the Midsummer day of that year which our friends believed must find us convinced of our folly and converted from the evil of our ways, and every link in the chain binding us to the Haunted River is connected, more or less, with the lonely house, on the threshold of which the caretaker, having unlocked the door, left us standing, while she hurried away to cook the cabbages she had, in the weed-filled garden, cut for her husband's dinner.
CONSCIOUSLY on the threshold of a strange house, we paused ere entering; then we passed into the hall, and in that moment unconsciously entered upon a new epoch in our lives.
A large square hall, with four doors opening off it, two facing us, a third to our right hand, a fourth to our left; when compared with the size of the hall, the staircase leading to the first floor appeared mean and insignificant.
Originally, as we afterwards learned, the house had been a much smaller edifice, and the staircase, fitting enough for its former surroundings, had not been changed with the increase of space around.
Here was one reason, I perceived at once, why the place might not be "everybody's money," and as we proceeded in our survey, other causes were not slow to suggest themselves.
As a residence for a family, the place was inconvenient in almost every respect; as a home for Georgie and myself, it seemed simply perfect.
Let me take it in detail, however, and describe the house as it appeared to us on that day when we first went to Maytree.
The hall was lighted not merely by a domelight above, but from two narrow windows, one on each side of the wide front door. It was a spacious hall, a hall calculated to raise undue expectations with regard to the rest of the house, but it delighted Georgie, who, skipping over the squares of black and white marble which formed the pavement, cried aloud—
"It cannot be, Peg. The woman must have meant one hundred and fifty and some enormous premium."
By this time we were au fait at house-hunting—understood all the evils and pitfalls which attached to "desirable residences," all the tricks of landlords, all the devices of house-agents, and out of the fulness of our experience my sister opened her mouth and spoke.
"I think it is fifty," I answered.
For the fact is, the moment I set foot within the threshold I felt we should eventually live in the place.
There came to me a strange sense of familiarity which could only have been bred by some spirit of prophecy.
As I walked forward to open the door of the drawing-room, the action did not seem strange. Somehow I knew all about the house.
Nothing was inharmonious—nothing unwonted. It was all as though the abode had been mine from infancy—as though I were at length taking possession of a property which was mine own—with which I had either formerly been well acquainted, or in which I had dwelt in some previous state of existence.
The drawing-room was a good-sized, ill-proportioned apartment, one window of which commanded the drive, while the other two opened on the verandah and the sloping lawn beyond.
The chimney-piece was of grey marble inlaid with white, and on the wide hearth were dogs for burning billetwood.
To the right hand of the fireplace was a door opening into a small withdrawing-room, a mere atom of a room, provided, however, with two windows, completing the four opening on to the lawn.
There was no means of ingress from the house to this small room except through the larger apartment, but from without it could be entered by either of the windows, or by a glass door which faced the north.
Retracing our steps into the hall, we looked at the room on the left hand of the hall as we entered.
Judging from the bookshelves which lined the spaces on each side of the fireplace, and from a lumbering old writing-table occupying a recess opposite the front and only window the apartment boasted, this room had been used as a library; and indeed it looked dingy enough to have served as a study to some magician engaged in unholy investigations.
To right and left of the recess were doors which, when opened, only disclosed two perfectly dark closets, fitted up with shelves, and smelling uncomfortably of blackbeetles and damp.
But still nothing seemed strange to me.
"I must have been in this house before, or seen one exactly like it," I thought, with a shiver I could not repress.
"What is the matter?" asked my sister. "Are you cold? Why, Peg, you look quite white!"
"Nonsense!" I answered. "It is the shade of this horrid paper."
"It is a horrid paper," she agreed. "Do look at those hideous patches like yellow frogs sprawling over that bilious green ground. It is not a bad room, though, if the walls were differently covered; and that is a fine chimney-piece, Peg; how beautifully it is carved! Oh, I do hope and trust there may be no hitch about the place, and that we shall be able to live here! Must not it be lovely in the mornings, with the sun falling aslant on all that rich flat country on the other side of the stream, and should not we have lovely saunters up and down the garden-paths in the moonlight? Peg, I can't believe it real. I fancy it must be all a dream."
It was like a dream to me.
Could it have been in my sleep that I had beheld just such another house, and entered similar rooms?
To that dark heavy writing-table, to the crouching lions that supported the irons for the logs to lie across, to the wreaths of flowers, the dead game, the elaborate leaves carved upon the high oak mantel-piece—everything was familiar to me as the remembered decorations in my father's house.
Nay, even a crack across one of the squares of white marble in the hall seemed to have some meaning attached to it, so persistently did my eye seek and single it out from its fellows.
"I wonder how that got broken," remarked Georgie, as we once again entered the hall; "and why 'the master' does not have it replaced?"
Afterwards, when we learned how it had got broken, we marvelled all the more that another square had not been substituted.
"This is the room for you, Peg," said my sister, as she turned the handle and entered the apartment which lay at the back of the hall. "North aspect, I should say; a good cheerless view of a sullen river and a sunken barge, plenty of withies, plenty of rushes, plenty of rank vegetation, plenty of sky! Here is the place for your easel; there a snug corner for my work-table. Is the floor oak, or merely stained and varnished? Well, it does not much matter which. We shall require no furniture except a square of carpet and a large glass fire-screen. Talk of subjects—why, you have only to paint that barge half full of water, that desolate-looking river, those tropical weeds, those dreamy waterlilies, and our fortune is made. Peg, you cannot give up this place. We shall come and live here, shall we not?"
"Yes, dear, if we can get it," I answered.
I confess that painting-room recommended itself to me.
Already my fingers itched to sketch that dreary scene on the details of which Georgie had enlarged.
If I could only manage to catch the combined colour of the reeds and the grasses, the willows, the river, the trees in the distance, the dingy barge with only one bright tint about it (a band of red painted across its stern), I knew the picture ought to sell; I felt certain it ought to procure me profitable orders.
"Let us have a look at the kitchens, and then go upstairs," I suggested; and accordingly, leaving the future studio, we opened the fourth door leading out of the hall, and found ourselves in a passage, or vestibule, that gave admittance into the offices, and also into a small inner yard, which seemed to have once been used as a drying-ground, but which was now knee-deep with weeds and grass.
One side of the yard, which was of a triangular shape, was bounded by the kitchens; another by the back wall of the dining-room and a laundry; while, on the third, lay what appeared to have been a towing-path [for barges and boats on the river]—indeed, we afterwards learned that at one time a towing-path had run along the whole length of the gardens and yards.
At the extreme corner of the laundry, and completely blocking out the light from the small window beside the stove, grew two immense yew-trees, the lower branches of which formed an archway through which one could see the river flowing quietly, darkly on.
As for the kitchens, they were small, dingy, and inconvenient, but certainly large enough for all the cooking Georgie and I were likely to require; and when we went upstairs, we discovered that the house only boasted two even tolerable bed-chambers, though there were eight in all.
The space over the hall was wasted in a broad passage, two small dressing-rooms, and the staircase.
"A house originally built without a plan, and subsequently enlarged without judgment," was the criticism I once heard passed upon the place; but, after all, what a blessing it is there are people content to set all architectural rules at defiance, and to build apparently grand houses, suitable really for only very little folk!
What would the possessors of small incomes do if it were impossible for them to find other habitations than the dreary houses in a dreary street, designed by builders for those who are content to find a roof to cover them, instead of a home to satisfy their hearts?
We stayed so long—Georgie and I—examining the house—peeping into all the cupboards, inspecting the empty stables, wandering up and down the lawns, dreaming beside the water, idly eating the fruit we had been told we might gather—that when we re-entered the lower rooms to close the shutters I had opened, the sun was westering, and the evening close at hand.
"I am sorry to leave it," said Georgie, as she hung up the key, wistfully eyeing the house; "I do hope we shall come to live here."
"Depend upon it, this is the place which has been standing vacant for us," I answered; and yet the while I spoke I shivered, I could not tell why. I liked the house; I hoped we should be able to take it; and yet, thrice since we stood within its boundaries, I had experienced that sensation which is described as "feeling someone walking over one's grave."
After all, however, that might mean nothing more alarming than the damp of an unaired house long tenantless.
To such signs and tokens I am apt to be a little indifferent; nor is this much to be wondered at when we remember there are people who shiver so often and so unreasonably as to suggest the idea that their final place of repose will be the junction of four cross roads.
AT the gate which had given us admission, we found the caretaker, who was come to make all secure for the night.
"I dursn't leave it unlocked," she explained, turning the key as she spoke, "or all the lads from Maytree would be down before daybreak after the fruit. It is lucky for us they are afraid of being about the place after nightfall, or my husband would have to sit up when the moon shone."
"What are they afraid of?" asked Georgia
We were by this time pacing along the road in the direction of the river, side by side with Mrs. Shooter, who resided in a small cottage which had once been a lock-house, from which, as she informed us, there was a field-path leading direct to Maytree station, and cutting off all the long corner round which we had walked.
"You can see now where the station is," remarked Mrs. Shooter, pointing to where a line of smoke marked the progress of a down train.
"Why are the boys afraid to come here after nightfall?" repeated Georgie, who was not to be diverted from her question by fifty Maytrees or a hundred trains.
The woman hesitated.
"It is all just nonsense, you know, Miss, and I do not think Mr. Lauston would like to have it talked about; but I do not mind mentioning to you, ladies (who are ladies—this parenthesis was caused by the value of the coin of the realm with which we had recompensed her civility)—"that they are afraid of the miller's ghost."
"The miller's ghost!" echoed Georgie. "Tell us all about it, do. I love ghost stories; I like hearing of ghosts; I delight in reading about them. There is to me a fearful joy in being frightened out of my wits—in feeling 'creepy' all over. What had the miller done? Why has he a ghost? Did he live up at the mill where the water comes down as it does at Lodore? Did he hang himself to one of the pine-trees, or did he kill somebody and grind the bones up into flour?"
We had reached Mrs. Shooter's house by this time.
At one side there stretched a weil-stocked garden, where Mr. Shooter, in the abandon of home life—dressed in shirt and trousers, with braces hanging artistically loose, his throat bare, and very old carpet slippers' on his feet—was employed in sticking peas.
On the other side was an enclosure devoted to the use of such live stock as hens, ducks, pigeons, and so forth; whilst in front a bit of greensward sloped down to the lock, through which the water now slipped unceasingly without let or hindrance.
"Will you be pleased to step inside, ladies?" asked Mrs. Shooter. "The kettle is boiling, and I could make you a cup of tea in a minute."
"We do not want any tea, thank you," answered Georgie; "we have been eating fruit ever since you left us. But I do want to hear all about the miller. Who was he, and why did he hang himself?"
"He didn't hang himself," said the woman, smiling, in spite of her natural solemnity, at Georgie's impulsiveness; "and it is all an old story now."
"The older the better," quoth my sister, seating herself on one of the wooden levers of the lock, and motioning me to do likewise. "Pray begin, Mrs. Shooter. First, what was the miller's name?"
"Dingley, Miss. He was a stranger to these parts. Came up from Gloucestershire, or some of them outlying places, to learn the business from Tom Snelling, who then owned the mill. I have heard my grandfather say, a better-looking nor a cheerier young man no person need have wished to see."
"And how did he get the mill?" asked Georgina.
"Mr. Snelling had a daughter, and they made a match of it; and they all lived together in that very house you have been over today. It was not so big then as it is now, but it was considered a wonderful fine place for the likes of them to own. They planted most of the trees, and laid out the gardens, and built the stabling for their horses. They meant to make a mansion of it, and thought they were going to be great folks. Ah! deary me! My grandfather helped lay them squares of marble in the hall; you noticed one of them was cracked, maybe. That was done the morning they carried Mr. Dingley in stiff and stark, but with all the weeds tangled about his clothes just as they took him out of the water."
"Then he drowned himself?" suggested my sister.
"Well, Miss, the rights of it never will be known now," was the answer. "For years and years things went well at the mill. Everything Tom Snelling and his son-in-law touched seemed to prosper. I have heard my grandfather say, if they bought a horse he turned to gold in their hands, and the same with everything else. They got land cheap, and then the railway came and put up its value.
"They took houses for bad debts, and in a few years' time got three times the rent they were let at by the old owners.
"Mr. Dingley had a troop of young children; and finer children, I believe, nobody need have desired. They were to be brought up quite ladies and gentlemen. The girls had a piano, and learnt foreign languages; and the boys went to boarding-school, and were to go afterwards to college.
"I don't know how it came about—I don't think anybody ever quite understood how it happened—but the word began to go round that Dingley was hard up.
"The old man had been dead then some time, and people did say Dingley was grown too much of a gentleman to attend to his business, and that he would one day repent having left the management to his foreman while he rode after the hounds.
"He got to be too fond of horses and betting, and suchlike; and when he found out how he had been robbed, and began to stick to business again, it was too late."
"He was ruined, I suppose," said Georgie.
"He was robbed, I believe. My father worked for him, and said if ever a man slaved like a negro, it was Dingley. He put down his horses; he took out his old coat again, and was at the mill before anybody came of a morning, and stayed writing up his books long after everyone had gone of a night. Many a time, when I was a child, I have seen the lights in Dingley's mill still burning after I was abed, and heard my father say to my mother, 'The master is still at it; wonder when he sleeps.'"
"Poor fellow! and he was beaten after all—"
"Aye, Miss, cheated and hunted to death, they do say. He had to raise money, and somehow, I don't myself understand the rights of it, but he gave too much power into the hands of the people who advanced what he wanted. He signed some paper he ought not to have signed; and just when he thought he saw his way clear, he was beggared."
"And so he drowned himself?"
"Well, Miss, as I said before, nobody ever knew the rights of it.
"It was one 31st of December, when the winter had set in uncommon early and severe, and the ground was like iron, and the river frozen over, and the trees white, and the earth white, and a cold moon shining over all, that the notice was served on him at the house yonder.
"My aunt was housemaid there, and she answered the door to the little dark fellow who came down from London to see the master.
"Mr. Dingley rose from supper, and went into the hall She heard what he said. Many a time I have listened to her repeating the very words.
"'What is it?' says the master.
"And then the other handed him a folded paper.
"Mr. Dingley opened it and asked what it meant.
"The little man made some answer she could not understand, and then the master said, 'My God! you can't mean it.' After that they went into the parlour together, the master taking a lamp from the hall to light them, and the stranger talked on for a while.
"My aunt could distinguish his voice, though she could not hear what he said, and in about five minutes the door opened, and the little man came out, and seeing her, said—'You had better send somebody to him.'
"My aunt went into the room, and found him sitting beside the table—the paper before him, and his face covered with his hands.
"Just then the front door banged after the little man, and he lifted his head at the sound, and noticed my aunt.
"'Can I get you anything, sir?' she asked.
"'No; go away,' he said, 'and keep everyone from me.'
"But she went and told her mistress, and she went to him, and the two of them—the husband and the wife—saw their old year out and their new year in, sitting there shut in together.
"My aunt sat up in the kitchen till the mistress came out and told her to go to bed.
"The poor lady's face, she said, was changed with grief, and when she answered my aunt and said she could do nothing more, her voice was quite hoarse and thick with tears.
"Well, my aunt went to bed, and at last fell asleep.
"She did not know how long she had been asleep, but it must have been some time, for the moon had sailed right round, and was looking in at her window, when she was awoke by someone shaking her.
"'Polly, wake up,' says her mistress; 'wake up, I want you.'
"Then between sleeping and waking, my aunt sat up, and rubbed her eyes, and asked what was the matter.
"'I can't find your master anywheres,' says her mistress; 'and I am afraid to go out by myself to look for him. I want you to come with me.'
"So it all came back to my aunt, and she got out of bed and huddled some clothes on her, and the pair of them went out together—all round the garden and the yard, and along the towing path, but ne'er a sign of the master could they light on.
"It was clear he hadn't been off the premises, for the gates all locked inside, and they were fast enough.
"Well, morning broke at last, and then they sent far and near in search of him.
"People did not know what to think. Some said he had run away, others that he had gone to murder the man who had bested him. Mrs. Dingley was like one distracted.
"My aunt began to fancy she heard queer noises after dark, and got into the habit of waking all of a sudden thinking the master was calling her.
"A young gentleman from London came and took the lead at the mill, and a dirty-looking old man arrived one day at the house, and stayed there.
"Mrs. Dingley herself was asked how soon she could make it convenient to move; and still the frost held, and the snow lay—hard, and white, and stiff, on the ground, and the water, and the trees—and there was ne'er a line or sign of the master."
Clearly it was not the first time, by many, Mrs. Shooter had recounted this story.
Practice had made her perfect, and there was really quite a dramatic rendering in the unconscious parallel she drew between the silence of nature bound in a grip of iron and the silence of Mr. Dingley lying dead under the ice.
I could not help watching the woman's face as, in utter ignorance of the point she was making, she paused for an instant to take breath; but Georgie's eyes were now following the stream—picturing, on that lovely summer's evening, the secret it had once, when the snow lay, and the frost held—drifted on with, slowly, sluggishly.
With his hands in his pocket, at this juncture, Mr. Shooter came sauntering towards us.
He had evidently heard the latter part of his wife's utterances, for, after vouchsafing a curt greeting, expressed in the words, "Servant, ladies," he remarked:
"So you're on about Dingley again, Sophy. Well, it don't matter to me. What we get out of the old house is no such fortune that I need try to stop your tongue when once it is set wagging."
And having so spoken, he surveyed the three of us with a broad and benevolent smile, as one who should say:
"You are but a parcel of poor women, and if it is a pleasure to you, as I know it is, to talk, and listen to a parcel of nonsense, go ahead, I won't prevent you."
"When did they hear of him?" asked my sister, lifting her eyes from the river, and turning them on Mrs. Shooter.
They are lovely eyes. Even Mr. Shooter, I have been since given to understand, likened them that evening to stars.
"They gave the poor lady no peace, my aunt told me, till she named a day for leaving.
"She sent to the lawyers, and she sent to her own friends; but lawyers and friends could do nothing for her.
"The house and the mill had been signed away, and the people they belonged to were a-goading of her to quit, and leave them to enjoy their ill-gotten goods in peace and comfort.
"But what my aunt said, and what I says" (this with a defiant look towards burly Mr. Shooter), "is, as no good comes to them as robs the widow and the orphan, and so it turned out."
"You can go on, Sophy, as you're started. I won't hinder you," observed Mr. Shooter, pulling a blade of grass, and commencing to chew it with an air of considerable relish.
"They called an auction, Miss," proceeded Mrs. Shooter, addressing my sister, and turning one shoulder upon her bigger half, "and from far and near folks gathered to the sale.
"Some came from prying, but most from pity.
"They had lived there, and never done harm to living creature—good master, good mistress.
"If a man was sick, neither old Tom Snelling nor his son-in-law said, 'Let him go on the parish.'
"There was something of his wages for him every week, and always soup, or a bit of meat, or a quart of milk, or a nice pudding from the house, if one of the children ran up for it.
"As for the mistress—well, you should have heard my aunt talk about her."
Was I mistaken?
Could it be that at this juncture Mr. Shooter vouchsafed me something as near a wink as was compatible with good manners?
I do not think I was mistaken.
Mr. Shooter replied to my gaze of inquiry with a smile, and, culling another blade of grass, began chewing it also with a relish.
"And Mr. Dingley?" asked my sister.
"I am coming to him, Miss. It wanted two days of the auction when a thaw began—a ground thaw, if you know what that means."
Georgie nodded.
"The snow melted off the trees, and the earth grew soft, and the ice broke up and floated down stream.
"At the house, bills were all over the place; the lots were laid out, the buyers had been to view, the children were all away—some sent to this relative, and some to that. My aunt had packed up all Mrs. Dingley's clothes and her own, and most persons—even Mrs. Dingley and my aunt—had a notion the master was gone foreign, and would write where the mistress was to meet him.
"Well, the auction morning came: it was a grey, drizzling morning, with a south wind blowing, and everybody in the house was astir early.
"The mistress was walking from room to room, holding a cup of tea in her hand.
"She had been round the garden and the stable-yard, and bidden good bye to everything, when there came a pull at the front bell.
"My aunt went to the door, and saw one of the bargemen.
"'We've brought back the master,' he said. 'Will ye break it to the mistress?'
"They're rough, you know, them bargemen; but many a pint of beer they'd drank at the house—and they was sorry.
"Just then Mrs. Dingley came out of the parlour.
"'What is it?' she asks, as he had done.
"'Mistress, they've brought him back,' says my aunt.
"'Brought who back?' and then she looked out, and see something carried on men's shoulders nearing the house.
"Nobody rightly knew what happened after that.
"She stepped forward as they crossed the threshold, and flung back the sail that covered him, and then, with a scream enough to rend your heart, fell into the arms of my aunt, who caught her.
"But that scream frightened one of the bearers, and he, dropping his end of the load, broke that square of marble you may have noticed, Miss.
"Ah! poor Mr. Dingley, he had come home for the last time, with the rushes and the reeds tangled about him, and a spray of yew tightly grasped in his right hand.
"You may have noticed them yews, Miss, in the back yard. Well, he must have met his death under them—walked in, Miss, unknowing—walked in a purpose; nobody can tell how."
"Anyhow, he was drowned," said Mr. Shooter oracularly.
"And his widow died broken-hearted, and the children emigrated or went to the bad," supplemented Mrs. Shooter, after which remark there ensued a dead silence.
"I SUPPOSE," I hazarded, at length breaking the silence,"that is the reason the house remains vacant."
"Not a bit of it," answered Mr. Shooter, cheerfully. "The Dingleys is an old story now, and it is only here and there one that minds aught about them. Why, Mr. Lauston lived nigh upon seven year at the Mill House; and if once you saw him, you would know there wouldn't be room for him and a ghost under one roof."
"Who is Mr. Lauston?" I inquired.
"Why, him as owns the place you have been looking over and the ground the mill stands on, and the farm land round and about."
"Then if people have forgotten the story of Mr. Dingley's death, why doesn't the house let?"
"Well, there must be some reason; but I can't tell you what it is exactly. For one thing, the place is lonesome; it would be dull for a small family, and 'tain't just big enough for a large one. Then some folk don't like the look of the old mill, and others can't abear the water.
"They will have it the house must be damp, which it ain't, and that the ground-floor must be flooded in the winter, which has never happened yet; and some ladies are afraid of their children falling into the river, and others that their sons and daughters will go boating and get upset. Then some people won't pay a big rent, and yet think there must be something against the place for such a low rent to be asked.
"They will have it that robbers could come up the stream, and it is no use telling them there has not been a house broken into about Maytree for twenty year; or else they fancy the water must make the situation aguish, as if a running stream could ever be unwholesome. Then some wants land, and the farm is let off; and others think the gardens would cost a mint of money to keep up—there is no end to the objections folk make; and then the place do look dull—there ain't no doubt of that; and it is known there have been queer stories about the mill. But, ladies, if so be as you want a house, I'll say this much: you might search Surrey through, and not find a quieter, nor a healthier, nor a cheaper place than that identical one down yonder."
"I am inclined to agree with you," I answered. "How did it happen the mill was allowed to go to ruin?"
"That I cannot say. Some says it has gone to ruin for this reason, and some for another."
"It seems odd, though, does it not?"
"It does," agreed Mr. Shooter, and he plucked and chewed a fresh blade of grass without looking at me; then he said—
"Look here, ladies, I don't want to deal one bit unfair by you; I can see you're sweet on the house, now ain't you?"
"Well, my good woman has told you her story," he went on, after we had confessed to the soft impeachment of which his previous sentence accused us. "And an old story it is, and worth nothing as against the house. But the mill, that's quite a different matter."
"We don't want to rent the mill," interrupted Georgie.
"All the better perhaps for you, Miss," said Mrs. Shooter; "there have been queer things about that mill."
"What sort of things?" I asked.
"All old women's tales, most like," her husband answered; "but still folk do say Mr. Dingley he walks there to this hour. Mind, Miss, I can't speak to the truth one way or other, only—"
"What he means," said Mrs. Shooter, taking up the unfinished parable, "is, that when Byers first took the mill, the day he got possession he found a man sitting in the office as vanished into air when he looked at him. Next morning the men saw an arm and hand stretched right across the door, barring it from staple to staple, an arm covered with a coat sleeve of dark grey tweed—a hand long and genteel, with a gold ring on the little finger—a gold ring set with a red stone."
This was too much.
I could not avoid glancing towards Georgie with a smile.
"I don't wonder at your making light of it, ladies," said Mrs. Shooter; "but Byers found it no laughing matter. Men won't work where something that ain't flesh and blood is always meeting and aggravating them. Now the stones had great lumps chipped off them. Next time the sluice would be broken; after that the machinery would be thrown out of gear, or the flour put overnight ready for loading found scattered all about the floor. They had in the police from Ettonfold, and then the detectives down from London, but they saw such sights, as I'm told made them old men. Did Jim Horne's father say, Steve, that the parson's fortune would be made if he only could see what a couple of them who sat up watching beheld with their own four eyes?"
"Aye, wife," answered Steve; "but then Jim Horne's father was a liar, as I have heard."
"I don't believe it; but at any rate the detectives from London warn't, and one of them, as I've been given to understand by them as ain't liars either, said as how one morning early, he, hearing a rap-rapping at the mill door, went down and opened it to a gentleman dressed all in dark grey tweed, who walked straight past him up the stairs, and into the counting-house, where he melted into thin air. Don't you forget that, Steve."
"I ain't likely to forget," said Steve, sulkily, "with that good-for-nothing mill and broken sluice always afore my eyes, and the water pouring and pouring adown that paved causeway, enough to deafen a fellow after heavy rain; but I mind just as well as I forget, and I know there's a big mill not far beyond the station on this very stream, that never would have been the concern it is if Dingley's wheel had still been turning Dingley's machinery. I blame nobody, and I says nothing; but I has my own opinions, and one of them is, if I had the money to do it, I'd work the old mill, Dingleys or no Dingleys, ghostes or no ghostes."
"Well, Steve, all I have got to say is simple, and it's this—'tis a merciful blessing you ain't got the means to go tempting Providence, or I b'lieve you'd do it."
"Aye, that I would, if you means by Providence the fellow as owns the mill on the Upper Water—a mean scrub of a chap, who sets himself up for a gentleman. Why, I lugged a parcel along to his house this arternoon that weighed a quarter of a hundred if it weighed an ounce, and he never was man enough to say—'Will you have a glass of beer?' he warn't."
Although some remark seemed to be expected in answer to the foregoing statement, Georgie and I remained silent.
No observation worth uttering presenting itself with respect to the manners of the gentleman at the mill up the stream, we held our peace and watched the water gliding away, on past the old house, between green banks, under drooping willows, circling round bosky aits, through the heart of a vast city, to the distant sea.
"I believe myself there ain't a word of truth in any story of the lot," said Mr. Shooter, harking back to the ghostly traditions connected with Dingley's Mill. "Why, I have been round the pond and down the race and tail, and past the ruins, at all hours of the night and early morning, and I never see nothing worse nor a rat nor a rabbit, and I never heard nothing more frightensome than the owls a-hooting. I don't hold with the notion of ghostes walking. What I says is, if a man has made a poor thing of his business while he's living 'tain't likely he can make a better by terrifying honest folk after he's dead."
"Aye; but what about them as ain't honest?" inquired Mrs. Shooter, pertinently.
"Pooh!" retorted Mr. Shooter, who, despite the prosperous miller's stinginess, I began to notice, must have partaken of more than one glass of beer before his return home.
"That's all very well," persisted his wife; "and it's all very well to say because you ain't happened to see nothing, nobody else ain't seen nothing either; but do you mind what Ike Toser said he'd take his davy upon? He were a bargeman, Miss, and it was a matter of nigh upon fourteen years agone, afore this lock was broken, and the tow-path on the opposite side washed away, and the foot-bridge that joined the two banks on the other side the mill-house carried down stream."
"She means afore the railway came to Maytree," explained Mr. Shooter, putting the case in a nut-shell.
"It were the last night in the year.
"Ike, he were taking his horses over the bridge, when he hears something go crack! crack! up the water, and he stopped his horses and stood still to listen.
"There were no frost; it was a dull, heavy winter's night, with but a glimmer of starlight, but still, through being used to the darkness, Ike could see almost as well as if it had been daylight.
"As I were saying, he listened, and then he heard another tremendous crack and splashing and struggling under the yew-trees at the back of the Mill House.
"'Anybody in the water? Keep yourself up; help's coming!' he shouts out, and ran off the bridge and up stream as hard as he could go.
"Then all in a minute, as he tore on, the moon shone out—mind this, there was no moon at all that night!—and he saw the river lying before him one sheet of ice, white and glittering—all white and glittering, except just in one place, where there was a hole, and the water looked dark and threatening.
"I've heard Ike tell the story myself.
"'I came out all over in a sweat,' he said, 'for I know there was no ice nor no moon; and while I was standing, too frightened to move, I see a hand and arm rise out of the water where the hole was—a hand with a gold ring on one of the fingers which clutched hold of the ice; and then the ice gave and broke the weight, and I heard a great cry, and the ice closed over the hole again, and the moon disappeared; and I fell on my knees and prayed, or leastways tried to pray, for the only bit of Scripture I could remember was what I learned at Sunday school—
"'"What's your name?"
"'"Ike Toser."
"'"Who gave ye that name?"'—
"You may laugh, Steve, but it is quite true, for the very next Sunday Ike went to church, and his going was the talk of the parish.
"Aye, and something more was the talk of the parish when he tried to drown his boy Billy.
"He said he saw wings growing out of Billy's shoulders, and the child flying away to be an angel—and a nice angel Billy would have made; so he caught him and held him under water till the brat was black in the face.
"I'm thinking the magistrate didn't pay much heed to Ike's story about the wings when they give him a month and a talking to. No!" proceeded Mr. Shooter, "what I say is—there's the house, and it's a good house; and Mr. Lauston, he lived there nigh upon seven year, and all that time nobody saw a ghost nor heard tell on one; and if these ladies take it, they'll have the cheapest house in the county of Surrey."
"Who is the landlord?" I asked, for the duet between husband and wife was becoming monotonous, and Mr. Shooter's tone towards his better-half aggressive, besides which even a June day must have its evening sometime.
"The landlord! Mr. Lauston. Who else should it be?"
"And where does he live?" I inquired, begging a question, it seemed, as unnecessary as impossible for me to answer.
"I don't rightly know where he lives now," said Mr. Shooter. "Out Teddington or Twickenham, or Richmond way; but his office is in Godliman Street, over against Saint Paul's, in London City. Anybody will tell you where he is to be found."
"And the rent you say, is fifty pounds a year. You are sure of that?"
"Sure and certain, Miss. And if so be as you should come to live nigh us, and you want an odd job done at any time, when I've an hour or two to spare I'll be glad to oblige you. Thank you, Miss. Yes, that's the best way to the station from here. You can't go wrong; there's a straight path takes you right out on the platform."
"What do you think of it, Peg?" asked my sister, when we were out of earshot of Mr. Shooter's habitation.
"I don't know what to think of them," I answered, with a backward glance towards the old lock-house. "He wants us to take the place, and she, I fancy, does not."
"Are you afraid of Mr. Dingley's ghost objecting to us as tenants?" she inquired, with a smile.
"No; I am not afraid of ghosts," I said; "but, after all, Georgie, it is a lonely spot."
"Not an atom too lonely," said my sister, enthusiastically. "Oh, Peg! only contrast that place at fifty pounds a year with our present lodgings at sixteen shillings a week!"
NEXT day, Georgie, who was always overrating her strength, and consequently overexerting it, could scarcely move from the sofa; and I therefore proceeded to Godliman Street all alone.
I had no difficulty in finding Mr. Lauston's place of business. A postman of whom I made inquiry directed me as to the number, and when I arrived at the doorstep, "Ground-floor—R. D. Lauston," were the first words that met my eyes.
Mr. Lauston was within, and disengaged, said a clerk, in answer to my questions; if I would favour him with my name, he would take it to his principal.
Having handed the young man a card, which he carefully studied as though there were some mystery attached to it or me, he disappeared through an inner door, and left me to contemplate the plans, maps, advertisements of insurance companies, posters of properties to be sold, representations of emigrant ships in full sail, and other such evidences of various businesses, which decorated the walls.
There was a very fine old chimney-piece—Sienna marble, most elaborately carved. On it were placed a City of London Directory, a tumbler and water-bottle (the latter furnished with a glass vase containing the regulation filter), a few volumes of the Bankers' Magazine, a letter-weight, and a few geological specimens—designed, doubtless, to impress and deceive the unwary.
The furniture of the apartment consisted of two office desks, well bespattered with ink, three office-stools, two old-fashioned arm-chairs, and three small chairs, upholstered in faded crimson velvet.
A safe occupied one corner of the room, and on the top of it, propped against an old mahogany knife-box, was an exceedingly small, dirty, and inferior oil painting, which Mr. Lauston subsequently informed me he believed to be of almost priceless value.
I was examining this work of art with professional interest—it represented the Annunciation; and anything like the expression of the faces I had never seen before, and have never seen since—when the door behind the spot where I stood opened, and the clerk, holding it wide for me to enter, said:
"Mr. Lauston will see you, madam."
I walked into the inner office.
There, behind a large library table, strewed with papers, sat Mr. Lauston.
He did not rise when I entered, but merely acknowledged my presence with an inclination of his head.
Waving his hand towards a chair, he begged me to be seated, and then continued his instructions to a different clerk from the one who announced me.
This young man stood beside the table, hat in hand, deferentially listening to the words of wisdom which fell from his employer's lips.
"You had better call at Allington's as you come back. It will be all on your way."
"Yes, sir."
"And don't forget to tell Difford he must be prepared by ten o'clock tomorrow, without fail."
"No, sir."
"And be sure you ask Mr. Marston the limit we are not to exceed."
"Yes, sir."
"Have you got those papers of Colwig's?"
"Yes, sir."
"Do you happen to know if Farthingley has returned from the north?"
"He has not, sir."
"Ah! well, you might just look in there as you pass, and remind his brother that on Saturday the first, the next instalment will be due."
"Yes, sir."
"I don't think there is anything else, except to call at the Bank, and ask Mr. Newton if he has had any advice from New Orleans."
"Yes, sir."
"That is all, I fancy. Can you remember any other matter?"
"No, sir."
"Then you had better be getting on. Oh! Durphy!"
Durphy was by this time at the door.
"Yes, sir."
"Take these papers round to the Poultry, and beg Mr. Horricks to sign and return them. Don't forget they must be witnessed."
"No, sir."
"Oh! And, Durphy!"
"Yes, sir."
"Just ask Marrion to let me have particulars of that little estate at Cheshunt. I beg a thousand pardons, Miss—Miss Vernam, ah! yes, Vernam! but this is such a busy day with us, and time and tide—as you remember, no doubt—wait for no man. And now, what can I do for you?"
And he turned his chair a little, crossed one leg over the other, put the tips of his fingers together, and looked at me with an expression of benignant patronage.
"I came to make some inquiries about a house of yours at Maytree which is to let."
"Maytree," he repeated; "Maytree—where is Maytree?"
"It is in Surrey," I answered; "and the house I mean is situated on a river, and near the ruins of an old mill."
"I remember now; thank you, I remember now," he said. "Yes—yes—yes—yes—yes, to be sure. And you want an order to view?"
"No, I have been over the place. We met a caretaker—a Mrs. Shooter, who allowed us to look at the house and grounds."
"Ah! very true. Shooter is the name of the person who lives in a cottage somewhere near there; worthy people, he and his wife," said Mr. Lauston, genially.
"I dare say," I answered. "The rent is fifty pounds, I believe."
"Guineas," corrected Mr. Lauston, promptly; "fifty guineas subject to certain conditions."
"Will you kindly tell me what those conditions are?"
"With the greatest of pleasure; but first permit me to ask you one question: are you making these inquiries for yourself or for a friend?"
Though the words did not, the tone said so plainly Mr. Lauston thought it impossible I could pay fifty pounds a year, that I felt the colour rising in my face as though I had been detected in some attempt at fraud.
"I want to rent your house, or a similar house, myself," I answered. "Perhaps I had better explain exactly how I am situated."
"If not disagreeable," suggested Mr. Lauston with a considerate smile.
Mine was so short and commonplace a story that I could tell it in a few sentences.
There were no complications, no wheels within wheels about the ruins which had been wrought.
It was simple as it was complete.
The estate had passed into the hands of a distant relative, upon whose generosity—if he possessed any—we had no claim.
The personality had been claimed by creditors, from whose charity it would have been vain to expect assistance.
But for the small fortune inherited from my own mother, Georgie and I could only have gone out into the world as paupers.
That money, however, being secured to me, no one had been able to touch it; and such few debts as I encroached upon the principal to pay were liquidated merely as matters of feeling and honour.
The amount which remained was, I explained to Mr. Lauston, sufficient to maintain us for some years, even without the exercise of my profession; but as I intended to devote myself to art, I hoped to be able ere long to live without drawing anything except the interest of the money.
To all which -particulars Mr. Lauston listened without a change of countenance; then, when I had quite finished, he began to question me.
To cross-examine me, rather; for though the process of testing my truthfulness was delicate, it was likewise searching.
He wanted to know why we had not remained in Yorkshire; why I wished to take a place so remote from society as the Mill House; why I had not canvassed all my friends for commissions; what encouragement I had received from the dealers in London.
How we had heard of our present lodgings; from what source we learned the Mill House was vacant—these questions, and many more, Mr. Lauston put to me, not baldly as I have set them down, but lightly and skilfully leading our talk to the points he desired to reach, and turning me inside out as easily as a lady might her glove.
There was fortunately nothing in our past or present, or in our plans for the future, that I desired to conceal from anyone, and Mr. Lauston might have achieved his end with one quarter the trouble he gave himself.
He was at length moved by a sort of reluctant admiration of my frankness, or it served his purpose to say he was, for he remarked,
"You are certainly one of the most straightforward young ladies I ever met, and I should like greatly to have you for a tenant; but still business is business, and I must have a premium for that place. I could not think of letting it for fifty guineas unless a premium were paid."
I thought of Georgie lying on that uncomfortable sofa in our stuffy parlour full of flies and sunshine, and my purpose failed me; but next moment I remembered the folly of undertaking an expenditure I might be unable to meet, and said boldly,
"Then I fear that settles the matter. Fifty pounds is a higher rent than I proposed giving; but still I could manage to pay it. A premium, however, I could not pay. Pray, do not think I am unwilling, Mr. Lauston—I am unable."
"Pray be seated, Miss Vernam; do not run away yet," he remonstrated, for I had risen to go, and with one hand resting on the edge of the table was standing looking wistfully in his face. "I will meet you if I can. I will consider how it is possible to obviate the difficulty. Though I am a man of business, I am not grasping—I hope you will believe that."
As he spoke he laid his hand on mine, without thought or premeditation, as I believed at the time, but such marks of earnestness were new to me, and I drew my hand away a little hastily, the while I blushed in a manner for which I could have slapped myself.
"I beg your pardon," said Mr. Lauston, with a deep air of apology, as though but just sensible it was neither a book nor a parcel he had touched. "Now let me think," and he knit his brows and pursed up his lips, and went through all those gestures I have since learnt many men consider necessary adjuncts of apparently profound deliberation.
"I can't see my way at present," he remarked, at length, abruptly; "but I am sure there must be a way—leave it to me—I am not quite alone in this affair, or perhaps I might feel tempted to say 'Yes' at once; there is another person to consult; but I will try to arrange it—I will arrange it somehow, in fact. By the bye, you had better give me the name of a friend or two. A mere matter of form, but still usual; and we may as well be regular. Any person will do—the clergyman of the parish, the family doctor, your father's solicitor, or his bankers—it does not much signify who so long as he is a reference. Let me see, could you conveniently call the day after tomorrow, or shall I write? You will call; thank you very greatly. Allow me."
And he rose and was moving forward to open the door, when I stopped him.
"I forgot to mention that the house is greatly out of repair; but perhaps you are aware of the fact?"
"Oh yes, certainly; it must be, of course, and will have to be seen to. No one, I suppose, could live in this place as it is."
"It wants painting and papering thoroughly. Many of the hinges and handles are off, the wet seems to have come through some of the ceilings, and the gardens are less gardens than wildernesses of weeds."
"So I should suppose; but all these things are mere matters of detail. Half a dozen tradespeople and two or three labourers would soon reduce chaos into order. You desire to take immediate possession, I presume, if matters can be arranged satisfactorily."
"As soon as possible," I answered. "My sister is anxious to be in the country, and I am anxious to be at work."
"For Mr. Bernard, you said, I think?"
"No; Mr. Berners."
"To be sure. How stupid I am about names. Berners of Alie Street."
"Not Alie Street," I answered, smiling leniently at his lack of memory, which, of course, I attributed to the engrossing nature of his own affairs; "Hanway Street."
"Hanway Street—true—pray forgive me; but really, unless I see an address in writing, I never can remember. That is the worst of accustoming oneself to an artificial memory. One's natural memory becomes useless. My memory is a Letts's Diary. Good day, Miss Vernam. I shall expect to see you on Friday, and I hope to have satisfactory news for you. Good morning;" and he held open the door of the outer office, to which point we had been slowly progressing; and as I bent my head, bowed his with a gesture of the most profound deference and respect.
I did not offer any more cordial leave-taking, and neither did he.
Clearly, therefore, the little episode of placing his hand on mine had taken place quite inadvertently!
ON the Friday appointed, I repaired once more to Godliman Street. Georgie had quite lost her headache, and in high spirits at the prospect of matters being finally arranged, offered to accompany me; but though I felt assured Mr. Lauston never intended touching my hand, and that the whole affair was quite a mistake on his part, and a misapprehension on mine, I still decided to leave my pretty sister at home.
I had the same jealous care for her as a mother might have cherished; and I could not help feeling that till we were differently situated—fenced in again with some of the externals of our former rank—it would be a relief to have Georgie in the country, far away from the men who, as we walked along, stared at her with bold or admiring eyes.
For the ordinary paths of life my sister was, indeed, far too pretty. I had never quite realized this until we came to London, and saw for myself that, though her beauty was not astonishing to me, it surprised strangers.
I had grown with it, watched its development, become familiar with each varying tint—each lovely turn of expression; but to others it seemed almost like a revelation.
Even the poor little drab, who toiled up and downstairs at our lodgings, turned round her untidy head, and looked wistfully at my sister, as she passed her on the way in or out.
To be sure, Georgie had always a smile and kindly look for the uncomely, hard-worked drudge; but I could see by the light which came into the girl's eyes, and the fatuous expression of pleasure which illumined her generally stupid face, that the gratification she derived from my sister's presence was one of pure admiration.
For I, too, was always kind and courteous to both our landlady and her servant, and yet neither of them ever assumed a look of beaming satisfaction when they gave me admittance.
On account of good looks, no lover had ever sought me—not even the lover so gay, so handsome, so fond, who could never return to me more; but it was otherwise with Georgie.
She possessed every beauty of colour, feature, expression, that captivates the eye, and enchants the imagination.
Since our departure from Yorkshire, this fact had been impressing itself more and more upon me, and so I decided to leave her behind when I went to seek my second interview with Mr. Lauston.
That gentleman was all graciousness.
He received me standing—he handed me a chair with as great a show of deference as if I had been a duchess.
He talked about the weather, and the London season, and the different places of amusement ladies were supposed to affect, as though we had met for an hour's sociable conversation. After a little, he began to speak about pictures, and casually mentioned the fact that he had a "gem" in the outer office.
"I am not a judge of such things myself," he said artlessly; "but I am told by connoisseurs the painting is most valuable. Perhaps you have noticed it?"
I answered that I had.
"And what is your opinion? But perhaps you are not sufficiently conversant with the works of the old masters to form a judgment."
I agreed that perhaps I was not.
"I have thought of sending it to be cleaned," he went on; "but one is loath to trust valuable pictures out of one's sight."
Here, at last, was a point on which we were at one, and I said very decidedly that if I owned good old paintings, I should require to be thoroughly satisfied both as to the capability and probity of any cleaner to whom I sent them.
"I wonder, Mr. Lauston," I went on, "that believing the work you mention to be so valuable, you let it lie about in a public office. Surely it would be safer at your own home."
"My dear young lady, a bachelor has no home. If I were so fortunate as to possess a wife, I should indeed be foolish to keep such a painting here! but a housekeeper at Twickenham is very much the same thing as a housekeeper in London. I wonder men do not marry—when we see all we lose we cannot help feeling—"
He paused.
I had brought this confidence as to his single state upon myself, but I did not wish him to enlarge upon the subject; and something in my face, I suppose, told him so, for he never completed his sentence.
Instead, he remarked—
"I shall be glad to congratulate you, Miss Vernam, when your pictures also become exceedingly valuable."
"Thank you," I answered. "I am afraid they will never be that; but I hope to earn bread and salt, and perhaps something more. My ideas on the subject of moneymaking are not extravagant; nevertheless, I hope to make a moderate income, and then I love my art. There is no labour in it for me—it is all pleasure."
"How heartily you speak," he said. "It is delightful to meet with anyone so thoroughly in earnest, and so simply downright as you are. I suppose, indeed—though it seems unintelligible to a mere business machine, such as I have become—there is a satisfaction in work for the sake of work. This is the case with you, I presume, for I imagine you do obtain high prices for your drawings."
"On the contrary," I replied.
"That is bad," he said, shaking his head; "but you will be demanding large sums ere long."
In turn I shook my head.
"I do not think so," I answered. "I know pretty well what I can do, and believe competency is only to be achieved, in my case, by patient industry. I am very thankful to feel assured I can compass even that. Many women, as you are aware, would be overjoyed could they be certain of earning a hundred a year by selling one little sketch a week."
"Most," he agreed. "But are you satisfied, young lady?"
"Thoroughly. I should, indeed, be ungrateful if I were not. It may be," I added, smiling, "that, perhaps, hereafter, I hope to be able either to make more than a hundred a year, or to make that hundred by selling one sketch a fortnight instead of one a week; but my ambitions are as modest as my expectations. Imagination has never run away with me yet."
"Then you really believe you are not destined to achieve a grand success?"
"I have great faith that I never shall," I replied.
"You make what I have to propose very easy," he said. "Since you were here, I have been exercising my mind how to get over the premium difficulty. As I, perhaps, explained, I am less owner than trustee as regards the Mill House; and it is, therefore, necessary for me to follow duty rather than inclination. The plan I thought might meet all objections is this. You shall take the Mill House, garden, and so forth, for a term of seven years. Would that suit you?"
"It is a long time to look forward to," I said, faintly.
"When you have lived as many seven years as I, you will know how short a time it seems in the retrospect," he answered. "So far as the Mill House is concerned, I do not see how I can make an arrangement for any shorter period. Under the circumstances, the term ought to be fourteen or twenty-one years; but I do not wish to be too strict or to frighten you. Shall we say seven years? You would not like to have to turn out at the end of three."
"We will say seven," I agreed.
During the time he was speaking I had hurriedly glanced over the position, and felt it was better we should be bound to the house for some considerable period.
If I were to do any good at all, I decided my time must be filled with hard, honest work, and my attention not distracted with questions as to whether we "ought to move," where "it would be best to live," and if we could "venture to afford a house nearer town," or at all events in a "more accessible position."
"You are quite clear about that?"
"Quite," was my answer.
"Then to reward you for your prompt decision, I will meet you as regards the rent. You shall have the place for fifty pounds a year, and in lieu of premium, you shall pay three years' rent in advance, and paint me half a dozen pictures. There, will that do? I have turned the matter over and over, looked at it from every conceivable point of view, and I believe I have made a capital bargain for you. I do not wish to say anything which may sound like a compliment, for I can see you do not care for the speeches most young ladies consider as merely their due, but it is a fact that there is not another woman for whom I would have taken so much trouble, and to whom I would have yielded so much. Your courage, your self-reliance, your industry—but there, I promised not even to seem to flatter—those traits have touched me. I shall say no more."
And with nervous fingers he moved some papers that lay before him, and making a feint of arranging them, gave himself and me the opportunity of recovering our self-possession.
"You are very kind, I am sure," I said at last, "and I feel greatly obliged to you, but—"
"Do not mention it, I entreat," he interrupted. "If it were in my power, I would do more, far more than that, to serve you. Now, how shall we arrange matters? I think you said you wanted to take possession as soon as possible. Yes; very well, you shall do so. I will just jot down the heads of our agreement, and send them on for your approval. Then they can be put into shape. And you must call here and sign the papers; or, if that should be inconvenient, I will call upon you, and have the matter settled immediately."
"If you let me know when the agreement is ready, I will call here," I decided. "And, to save time, I will post to you, when I get home, a list of the repairs which are most necessary and pressing."
"Pray do," he answered, "though they can be done after you are in the house. I suppose you will want to get rid of the expense of lodgings as quickly as may be. At Eddingfold there are some good tradespeople who do their work well and economically. I will write to them on the subject. Yes; you post me the list, and leave the rest to me. As for the pictures, finish them quite at your leisure. I shall not prove a hard task-master; but if ever you are down in Yorkshire, I think I should prefer to have some landscapes taken in that part of the country. You see, I am so familiar with Surrey!"
"There is a ruined mill near the house," I suggested; "that would make a good subject."
"My dear young lady, have mercy!" he exclaimed. "I hate and detest the very name of the mill. For seven long years it annoyed my eyes, troubled me by day, and 'prevented the night watches.' I have had more difficulty about that mill than about all the rest of my business put together. One of these days I shall go down with a few pounds of gunpowder, and blow it up—leave no stone standing on the other. Not any sketch of that cheerful edifice for me, thank you."
"Very well," I said, laughing at his earnestness; "I will look over my portfolio, and see if I cannot find some landscapes of a different kind of country."
"You are goodness itself," he remarked, adding, "I shall hear from you, then, and you will hear from me."
As we parted, he held out his hand, and I gave him mine in return without any hesitation.
He had behaved, as I considered, with great kindness; and yet, as I wended my way back to our lodgings and Georgie, I was unable to divest myself of an uneasy feeling that Mr. Lauston was not quite so sincere as his words and manner implied.
IT was on a dull evening, in the latter part of July, that I walked across the fields from Maytree station towards the Mill House.
Not an ideal evening by any means—not the sort of evening one would have selected for the purpose of taking possession of a new house—but in such wise events had fallen out, and I was too much accustomed to nature's moods to be seriously affected by a grey sky, low-lying clouds, a drizzling rain, and the moist steaming mist which was beginning to rise over the meadows on the other side of the river.
After all, it was home, to which each step was taking me nearer—and not a homely home either—a wonderful home, I reflected, remembering what had happened to us, and what might have happened—a home to be proud of, to grow fond of, to regard with affection, and to feel thankful for having been permitted to find.
And I was thankful.
I could have found no words in which to express all the gratitude lying deep in my heart, but my whole nature seemed steeped in a gentle content, and to the hymn of praise my soul was singing, the gliding river, the murmuring reeds, the rustling leaves, and the songs of the birds, which never in that neighbourhood seem really to cease by day or night, formed a fitting accompaniment.
I was tired.
I had spent a long and weary day in London, and how pleasant, after the hot streets, the close smoky atmosphere, the babel of noise, and the strain upon my mental capacities, the change to that pure air seemed, may be imagined by those who love the sights and tones of nature, to whom woods and fields and streams are as the remembered faces of cherished friends, the rush of waters, the sighing of the wind, the rain dripping through the trees, the gentle waving of the meadow grass, as the sounds of familiar voices, the greetings of the bygone days when there was not a change of season, a variation of weather, a fall of snow, or a burst of sunshine but brought rapture with it to hearts still innocent of care.
When I rang the bell my sister opened the door in person.
"Welcome home, Peg," she said, giving me a sisterly hug, and an honest, loving kiss. "May you spend many a happy year in this sweet spot;" and then, without giving me time to return her hearty greeting, she rushed on to say that the place was prettier—a hundred thousand times prettier—than she imagined it on the occasion of our first visit.
"The garden is in a state of ranker luxuriance than ever," she finished, laughing; "and we have lit fires of billet-wood in every room in the house, and there is not a stick of furniture in its proper place; and you have not an idea, Peg, how deliciously uncomfortable everything is."
How pretty she looked—prettier than ever, with her skirt pinned back, her sleeves tucked up, her hair a little rumpled, her colour a little deepened, her eyes sparkling with pleasurable excitement, and her feet dancing a measure to the melody which was echoing in her heart.
"Come upstairs, Peg. No; first you shall see the drawing-room. No; while it is daylight you must come round the place, now it is all our own. Never mind the rain. It cannot spoil our dresses. You shall see the artichokes. It is all very well for you to say you do not care to paint flowers, but you shall paint that flower with a lovely branch. Oh! such a branch of the genuine old-fashioned fuchsia drooping over the plant! I mean to set you about it tomorrow. Mary and I have settled up the studio, and the room is cosy beyond belief. We are going to have tea there. Mrs. Shooter has baked us some scones, and I have asked her to make inquiries about poultry, so that we may 'grow' new-laid eggs. Oh, Peg, we ought to be able to live on almost nothing here."
"My dear girl, I have no desire to live on nothing."
"I meant for nothing. There are heaps of vegetables in the garden, and lots of fruit; Mrs. Shooter says there is plenty of fish in the river, and surely we can rear our own chickens. I think we ought not to spend a pound a week. I am going to be housekeeper, remember, and mean to be so economical. You must do nothing but paint and amuse yourself. How did you get on with Mr. Berners today?"
It was in consequence of an intimation from that gentleman of his wish to see me before I left London that Georgie and our newly engaged domestic had started for Maytree by an early train, while I followed in the evening.
As I had called upon my patron only a few days previously, I was somewhat at a loss to imagine why he desired me to pay him another visit; but Mr. Berners soon made that point clear.
When I entered the office at the rear of his shop, I found him, as usual, seated on a high office stool, tilted well back, his hat half on his head and half on his shoulders, one leg tucked up on the rail of the stool, the other stretched out on the rail under his desk, his waistcoat unbuttoned, his coat flying wide open, himself in a state of profuse perspiration, one hand hanging listlessly by his side, the other grasping a short ruler, with which at intervals he hit himself and the stool and the desk purposeless raps.
There had been a time when Mr. Berners removed his hat at sight of me, descended from his stool, and stood at "Attention;" but that was before he quite realized the fact I was the daughter of Mr. Vernam of Grangedale, who bought pictures from him, no longer, but only a vague Miss Vernam painting pictures herself, and feeling very grateful to anyone who would buy them from her.
It was not that Mr. Berners meant to be either uncivil or familiar. It was merely that finding there no longer existed any necessity to put himself out of the way on my account, he received me as he would have done any one of his intimate acquaintances, except I am thankful to say that he never addressed me, as he did all of them, by my Christian name.
"So here you are!" was his greeting.
"Yes, Mr. Berners, here I am, punctual to the hour you named. For the future, when you wish to see me, I wish you could manage to permit me some choice as to the time."
"I had to attend a sale this morning," he explained, "and as you said you were leaving town today, I did not know when I might have another chance of seeing you. Won't you sit down? there is a chair behind you."
"No, thank you; I wish to catch the next train from Waterloo, and I can do so if you will kindly say at once why you sent for me."
"Oh! it is not a matter of much consequence, only if you are going to throw me over, you may as well tell me so at once."
"Throw you over! what do you mean?"
"Just what I say. Naturally, if this new patron of yours is going to make your fortune, you won't care to bring much more of your work here."
"New patron—make my fortune!" I repeated in bewilderment, for I could see the man was not joking; that he was, on the contrary, very seriously in earnest. "Mr. Berners," I went on, "pray, be a little more explicit. I assure you I have not the faintest clue to your meaning. I have not the slightest intention of taking my drawings elsewhere; I have found no new patron; I have not looked out for one; none has come to me."
Mr. Berners made a savage cut at his desk with the ruler; then tilting back his hat till it was almost off his head, turned and looked me straight in the face.
In blank amazement I looked at him.
"You are like all the rest," he remarked, after a moment's scrutiny; "you'd almost make a man believe black was white. Why, to look at you, anybody might feel almost compelled to think you were speaking truth."
"I am speaking the truth, Mr. Berners," I answered with a little natural vexation in my voice. "If I had found a new patron, I should tell you so; if I were going to leave you, I should tell you that also."
"Well, then, what about that order for pictures you have taken lately?"
"I have taken no order—" I was beginning, when suddenly the recollection of my agreement with Mr. Lauston recurred to me. "Oh! I know what you are thinking of," I cried, "though how in the world you heard anything about it I cannot imagine. I would not pay a premium for the new house we have taken; so the landlord proposed I should let him have half a dozen landscapes instead."
"What sort of a looking fellow is he?" asked Mr. Berners.
"He is an elderly man," I answered; "rather above the middle height."
"A little taller than me," said Mr. Berners, taking up the narrative eagerly; "and a trifle stouter, with iron-grey hair, scarce about the temples and top of his head, big ears, keen brown eyes, bushy overhanging eyebrows, a nose that would be somewhat hooked if it had not been flattened into a sort of droop at the end; clean-shaved, except a fringe of whisker on each cheek; not a bad mouth, but shows a bit of the inside of the lower lip; has lost a piece of one of his front teeth, carries a silver snuff-box, and has a few hairs on the first joint of each finger."
"You ought to have been a detective, Mr. Berners," I exclaimed, in involuntary admiration of his perceptive faculties. "That is the very man."
"Pooh!" said Mr. Berners, in depreciation rather of the united company of detectives than of my compliment. "If I saw a person once, I would know him again in twenty years' time if I met him among a thousand people, and so I would an artist's touch on a picture. You could not deceive me."
And laying aside the ruler, he buried his hands deep in his pockets, and began see-sawing the stool backwards and forwards till I trembled lest he should upset it, and himself with it.
"Where did you see—the—gentleman?" I inquired, after a pause.
"In the shop first," answered Mr. Berners, moodily. "I was busy at the time with a customer from the Black Country; but I had an eye on this gent, and I confess he took me in. When I saw him walking about with my man, a pair of gold glasses on his nose, a quiet diamond ring on his little finger, and a matter of a hundred pounds in his watch and chain, I decided, 'There is a party who has made his money easy, and now wants to spend it handsome.' I made sure of a cheque for a round sum, and when I had done with the Staffordshire gentleman, and your friend asked if I was at leisure and he could speak with me, I considered the money as good as lodged in the bank."
"And what did he want to speak to you about?" I asked, in a perfect agony of curiosity.
"Want! Why, he wanted to pump me about you," and as if he had sounded the deepest depth of the contemptible and ridiculous, Mr. Berners relapsed into despairing silence.
"What did he want to know about me?" I persisted, for the subject was becoming more than interesting.
"He wanted to know about your prospects of success; said he was aware you had done work for me; asked if you were likely to make a name, and all the rest of it."
"And what did you say, Mr. Berners?" I asked.
"Oh! I was quite fair to you, don't be afraid. I told him you were a very painstaking young woman, conscientious in your work, and so forth; that I considered, given fair play, you might turn out some very creditable drawings, and that I felt satisfied none of your friends or relations need be alarmed concerning the career you had chosen; you see, I didn't know who he might be, and if there was any money to be given, or legacy left, I thought it only right to put in a word for you."
"Well—and then—"
"Then he asked if I had any of your drawings about that he could see, and I told him 'No.'"
"No! Mr. Berners, and with that little landscape hanging within a yard of the door?"
"If fifty landscapes had been hanging under his nose, I'd have said the same. I know my business, and how to manage it. If I didn't, it would soon manage me, and precious soon, too."
"What did he say when you told him you had none?"
"He said it was unfortunate, because he could have wished to form an idea of what you were able to turn out. So then I put a question to him; I said, 'May I make so bold as to ask why you want to know what the lady can turn out?' We were walking down the shop at this time together, so he just lifted his double glasses, and fixing them well on his nose, pulls up right opposite that bit of moorland yonder, and says—
"'Certainly. I am interested in Miss Vernam's success because I have, without ever seeing one of her productions, given her an order to paint me half a dozen pictures.' Those were his words.
"After he went away, I asked my man whether that gent had taken any particular notice of the Yorkshire Moor, and he told me he had examined it close, asked the name of the artist, and whether we could give him his address. Catters—that's my man—said the artist was gone to Rome, or Florence, or South America, he wasn't quite sure which. You see, Catters is an innocent sort of chap, and it never entered into his mind we were being done. However, that can't be helped now. I have no doubt he went straight away from this place and got you to sign that agreement How much premium did he want?"
"Fifty pounds," I answered. "So you see, at your prices, Mr. Berners, he has made a considerable loss."
"Ah! he's a very different sort of fellow to what I am," said Mr. Berners; "he'll make his money out of those drawings, never fear. He'll crack them up sky-high. He'll show them off as the early, or careless work of some well-known artist. I'd rather, yes, that I would, have been the fifty pounds out of pocket, myself, than have been bested by such a plausible old beggar."
"Then the next time I have to choose between paying fifty pounds and painting half a dozen landscapes, I will come to you before I decide," was my artless comment.
"Humph!" said Mr. Berners, in disparaging notice of this suggestion.
"I suppose that was all you wished to say to me?" I remarked.
"Yes; that was all."
"Then I will go—as I particularly want to catch the six o'clock train."
"Very well. By the bye, what did you tell me was the name of that fellow?"
"Lauston."
"What is he?"
"I haven't an idea. He owns the house we have taken at Maytree, and his offices are in Godliman Street."
"He is a precious old scoundrel; I think we may be sure of that."
"Possibly. There are some persons who believe it to be a safe rule to think the worst of everyone till convinced to the contrary."
"I know nothing about that," grumbled Mr. Berners; "but take my advice, Miss Vernam, and don't be led away by him. It is no concern of mine, to be sure, and it won't put a penny in my pocket that I am aware of; but still, don't you get into Mr. Lauston's power, or you will repent your rashness. Now, remember, I warned you."
"I will remember. Thank you. Good-bye." Mr. Berners descended from his stool, and, with his hands still deep in his pockets, lounged gloomily down with me to the outer door.
"I will bring you up some drawings shortly," I remarked, ere stepping into the street.
"All right," he said, as if his weakness were yielding a belief his reason denied.
THIS, and much more, of no interest to the reader, I told Georgie, as we two paced round the gardens.
Except as regarded any little difficulty created by my sister's pretty face, I kept no secrets from her.
If I were troubled, she knew the cause—if I were pleased, she understood the source of my gladness; and for this reason, though I confess Mr. Berners' revelation had surprised and perplexed my mind in no slight degree, still, in my bewilderment, I confided in Georgie—as she, dear girl, in every babyish sorrow, in every childish grief, had confided in me.
"You had better come in now, Peg," said my sister, at last. "This rain, though light, is wetting; and you must be both tired and hungry."
"I am tired," I answered; "but I don't think I am hungry."
"You will be tomorrow," said Georgie. "I have been eating dry bread today—with an appetite."
"How does it happen," I asked, as we crossed the ivy-covered bridge, spanning the waste water from the ruined mill, "that the grass has not been mown on the lawn, or the weeds grubbed up in the garden? How dilatory Mr. Lauston's people seem to be!"
"He told them everything had better remain as it was till you came down and gave them instructions," answered Georgie; "at least, that is Mrs. Shooter's version of the matter."
"Is she here now?"
"No; she left an hour—two hours ago, to prepare Shooter's tea. Come in, Peg; ours must be ready."
We partook of that meal in the room which Georgie had set apart for the future studio.
Upon the hearth faggots blazed cheerfully; outside the windows, open to the ground, a lawn sloped down to the river.
As I lay back in an easy-chair, with my slippered feet touching the fender, there came over me that sense of warmth and rest and peace of mind which, with those whose circumstances are the down-balls of fortune, proves usually the precursor of anxiety and grievous annoyance.
"I feel as happy as a queen tonight," I said to Georgie, as I handed over my cup for a second cup of tea.
"Spite of Mr. Berners?" she asked, smiles dimpling her lovely face.
"Spite of everybody," I answered. "How glad I shall be when it is time to go to bed!"
"We shall all be glad to go to bed, I fancy, dear," said Georgie, yawning. "May we violate the proprieties by 'retiring' before half-past ten; or must we put on the clock, like the man who did not wish to 'break the Sabbath,' but thought it would be a sin to let his less scrupulous neighbours carry off the whole of the booty from a wreck?"
The next morning was lovely.
The sun shone brightly, and the birds sang loud and high.
The drops of rain were still glittering on the foliage, and everything looked fresh and bright after the showers which had fallen at intervals all through the night.
Leaning out of the window, I drank in the clear, pure air, the perfume of some recently cut hay, the mingled scents of roses and mignonette, and gladdened my eyes with the sight of a calm, peaceful country landscape—waving crops, luxuriant meadows, stately trees, gleaming water, cows knee-deep in rich pasturage, idly munching the sweet grasses springing in the low-lying fields across the river, which stole on calmly, tranquilly, with an even, steady flow.
Early though it was, Georgie's voice greeted me from the garden.
"What do you think of this?" she asked. "Isn't it an ideal morning? I have been up ever since four o'clock. The kettle is boiling; shall I bring you a cup of tea?"
Answering in the negative, I dressed as rapidly as possible, and hurried downstairs, where I found breakfast laid in the same room where we had on the previous evening partaken of tea.
"After this morning we will reform, and do everything decently and in order," observed Georgie; "but the river looked so lovely, I could not resist the temptation of having our coffee here. What is the programme for today?"
"Mine is very simple," I answered. "I shall get to work at once. I do not want to lose one hour of the fine weather."
"Then you mean to go out sketching?"
"Yes. I shall do that old mill first. It is just the sort of thing Mr. Berners will like."
An hour later I was wandering about the ruined building, trying to decide from which point the grey, moss-covered walls, the broken wheel, the foaming water, the precipitate banks, the weird, solemn-looking pines, grouped themselves most effectively.
At length I was satisfied, and began my sketch.
By noon I had made satisfactory progress.
I had caught some good effects of light; and I felt that under my fingers, not merely a landscape, but a story was growing—a story of wrong, of mystery, and disaster.
The first time I looked upon the mill it impressed me with a sense of desolate sadness; and when Mrs. Shooter told me the tale of Mr. Dingley's misfortune and death, my imagination began to surround the scene with a sense of tragic interest.
What almost unconsciously I wanted—what I desired—was to give to my picture a meaning beyond that contained in the mere natural components which constituted the actual details.
If I could only reproduce even a part of the impression borne in on my own mind, everyone who looked hereafter at the scene depicted would understand each adjunct said, "As plain as whisper in the ear! The place is haunted!"
The pathos of the broken wheel, the water rushing down unheeded, the desolate silence of the mill, the unchanging gloom of the pines, needed no interpreter; but that which required a deeper inspiration, a truer translation, was the tale of anguish, of struggle, of weary, useless contention against adverse fortune, which ended in silence and ruin.
How could I convey all this to the spectator?—by what cunning touch of gloom heighten the desolation of that desolate building—bring out in stronger contrast the bright sunshine lying athwart the landscape in the distance, and the brooding shadows dwelling around the ruined walls?
I had sketched in the empty barrels stained with exposure to the weather, the hoops dropping off, the staves falling out.
I had added the rusty chain hanging from the loop-hole in the top story, the chain which had drawn up its last sack of wheat, lowered its last bag of flour.
I had shown how rotten was the platform on which no more busy feet might ever tread, and I was sitting with suspended brush looking at the mill, and wondering what it was my sketch still lacked, what of human interest and human sorrow, when I became aware that I was not alone.
I felt this. Of knowledge I could not be said to understand there was another person beside myself looking on the scene, because I was aware of his presence ere my eyes beheld him.
Not a sound had broken the silence, not a shadow had fallen across the grass or the water, and yet he was there.
I looked up.
Clear against the sky, clear as the pine tree against the trunk of which he leaned, stood the figure that supplied the one thing I had felt my sketch wanted.
With arms folded, with head slightly bent, his attitude indicative of despair, or melancholy, or both, he, motionless as a statue, remained looking down upon the ruined mill.
With his back towards the water and the foam bubbles, and the sunshine lying warm on the bank behind, with the darkling clouds closing up about him, and the utter desolation of that silent building lying below, he seemed to my fancy the very embodiment of the spirit pervading the scene, the representative of the story I had myself lacked genius to tell.
I never worked so fast, I think, as I did while filling in this final and most important detail.
I never threw such heart and energy into any labour before.
Each time I lifted my eyes I trembled lest my model should have vanished or changed his position; but no, he stood there immovable.
As if, understanding my purpose, he was humouring it.
Darker grew the clouds, all brightness disappeared from the sky, from the greensward the dancing sunshine vanished, but still I worked on.
I had just finished, just put one last touch to the pose of the solitary figure in the landscape, when Georgie's hands were placed on my shoulders, Georgie's voice sounded in my ear.
"It is going to rain, Peg," she said; "you had better come home. Dinner will soon be ready, and Mr. Wimple's man from Eddingfold has 'brought over some patterns of papers, if you please, Miss, for Miss Vernam to select which she will be good enough to order.' What a lovely thing you have made of it!" she went on, pointing to my drawing; "and oh! Peg, where did you get that man? his attitude is simply perfection."
"Hush!" I entreated; "do not speak so loud. He will hear you. Remember how distinctly sound travels uphill."
"Where is he, then?" asked my sister, lowering her voice almost to a whisper.
"Where!" I repeated; "standing under the pine, tree, as I have drawn him."
Georgie opened her eyes in amazement, then her keen swift gaze scoured the landscape in all directions.
"You are jesting," she said, at last. "There is no person in sight."
"What a stupid little mole you are!" I exclaimed. "Do you see those pine trees that seem almost to overhang that stream?"
"Perfectly."
"Well, carry your eye to the fourth and last of them, that on the top of the rising ground, the one the trunk and foliage of which is so clearly denned against the sky."
"I have done so. Where must my eyes wander next?"
"Nowhere. You see him now, do you not?"
"Do you mean that he is standing near that tree?"
"Yes—leaning against it."
"My dear Peg, either I am blind, or you are mad; there is no man standing there."
"There are none so blind—" I was beginning, exasperated, when Georgie stopped me.
"I assure you," she persisted, "there is not a living thing in sight, not even a crow. You have been looking so long at your drawing that your eyes are full of the objects it contains."
"Do you want me to doubt the evidence of my own senses?" I asked a little angrily.
"Well, my dear, it is almost as broad as it is long," she answered, with an amused smile, "and if I must choose between the two, I should prefer doubting the evidence of your senses to suspecting the accuracy of mine."
I was too much provoked to argue the matter further.
"I do not care who he may be, or what he may think," I said, rising. "I shall go and speak to him."
"And dispel an optical delusion," answered my sister. "Peg, do you really and truly believe there is a man standing there?"
But I would vouchsafe no answer.
Up the narrow, unused path beside the stream I wended my way, past the mill, across the narrow plank spanning the mill pit, and so beyond the weir to the further pine trees.
Scarcely for a second did I remove my gaze from the figure of the man who with folded arms and bowed head still stood looking down upon the desolate scene below.
All the way I kept my eyes upon him, and as I approached nearer and nearer I could see first one detail of his dress and then another.
Even his features became distinctly visible, and though I could not boast Mr. Berners' keen faculty of observation, still I felt certain I should recognise that dark, sad face wherever, whenever, and however I chanced to meet it again.
For a moment the deep, sunk eyes were lifted from the distant mill and raised to mine, with a weary, wistful expression, and then instantly the place he had occupied was vacant; between myself and the tree was a space of green turf, without a human being on it.
Where he had leaned against the pine was the trunk covered with rugged bark, but of the person I had seen not a trace remained.
At the same moment I remembered Mrs. Shooter's reference to the man who had walked into the mill dressed in a suit of dark grey tweed; the man who disappeared from the sight of those who admitted him, as this man had disappeared from mine.
"Well," said Georgie, when I rejoined her, "which of us was right?"
"I found no one there," I answered curtly.
Already that mysterious house was casting its shadow between us; not twenty-four hours in possession, and already my heart carried the burden of a secret I could not share with my sister!
THE samples of paper-hangings submitted for our approval by Mr. Wimple's managing man were of that order of art which finds favour in the eyes of the million.
Anything more astonishing and trying than the majority of the patterns he unrolled before us cannot well be imagined; and Mr. Wimple's representative evidently conceived a poor opinion of our taste, as design after design heralded as "chaste," "elegant," "marvellously effective," the "very latest triumph of combination," was rejected, if not with contumely, at least with a silence which pronounced us destitute of artistic sensibility.
Half a dozen less offensive than those we had heard lauded so highly were placed on one side for further consideration.
"I think that might do for the drawing-room," I remarked to Georgie, taking up one of these more modest patterns, and holding it in a light favourable for the contemplation of its beauties.
"It is a very neat thing, very neat, indeed," said the man; "but if you would not object to a little more money, we have something at the warehouse I think might suit you better than that. I do not know how I chanced to overlook it. A very superior article indeed. Quiet, but good; exactly your style, I should say, ladies; and we could put it in for you low; that is, low considering the quality. We had it down for a gentleman, a large customer, who afterwards preferred another, and so it was thrown on our hands. It is too good for the bulk of our work; and it is almost too quiet for houses where something first-class is required. If you will make a selection for the dining-room, I think, subject to your approval, ladies, it might be well to leave the drawing-room question open till you have seen this paper."
"Very well," I agreed; "but about price. I suppose you know the limit Mr. Lauston would not wish exceeded."
"I believe, madam, he told Mr. Wimple that would be entirely a matter for your consideration."
"What a model landlord!" said Georgie, sotto voce.
"I beg pardon, ladies; I hope you will excuse the liberty I am taking; my intentions are good, I do assure you; but, begging pardon again, do you expect Mr. Lauston to pay for these decorations?"
"Of course," I said, and Georgie echoed "Of course" also.
"Mr. Wimple thought there might perhaps be some misapprehension, and desired me to explain to you that Mr. Lauston's instructions to him were perfectly clear. If honoured by your commands, we were to execute the work, in every respect, as if for Mr. Lauston; but the bill—excuse me, ladies, speaking so very bluntly—was- to be sent in to you."
"To me!" I repeated, in bewilderment. "Why, this is not my house. I never heard of such an idea as expecting a tenant to pay the cost of repairs; besides, I gave Mr. Lauston a list of the work it was absolutely necessary should be executed, and he agreed with me there was not a thing I had set down but might be considered essential for ordinary comfort."
"Of course, madam, it is not my business, but I think you will find that Mr. Lauston does not mean to pay even for the repairing of a lock. In fact, we know that he has mentioned to several tradespeople at Eddingfold that you were likely to prove a very good customer, as the house was considerably out of repair."
"Out of repair! I should think so, indeed!"
Mr. Wimple's man, with his head a good deal on one side, slowly rolled up some pieces of paper.
"Perhaps," he suggested, "you would like to see Mr Wimple. I am sure he would come round with the greatest of pleasure."
"No, thank you," I answered. "I will write to Mr. Lauston, today—at once. What time does the next post go out?"
Mr. Wimple's man said the post had gone out from Maytree; but he, returning immediately to Eddingfold, would be most happy to take charge of my letter—thereby saving a delay of some hours.
It took me but a very few minutes to dash off a note to Mr. Lauston, expressing my astonishment at the idea taken up by the local tradespeople, that I meant to pay the expense of the needful painting, papering, plumbing, and so forth.
I said I felt certain there must be some misapprehension on their part, and begged Mr. Lauston to write to them immediately he received my letter, in order to disabuse their minds of the absurd crotchet I had mentioned, and request that the work might be begun at once, and finished without delay.
"At present," I added, "the house is almost uninhabitable," and I signed myself, "yours truly," having commenced the note with "Sir."
By return of post an answer arrived from Mr. Lauston.
He was not to be daunted by coldness or annoyed by feminine petulance.
He began, "My dear Miss Vernam," and subscribed himself, "Most faithfully yours."
As for the letter, its tone was mild, conciliatory, and explanatory.
He regretted, more than he could express, that there had been any misunderstanding about the matter.
Throughout the transaction he had been influenced but by one wish—viz., the desire to do anything and everything possible for me, compatible with the duty he owed to others.
With this view he had written to the local tradespeople, and begged them to put me upon their very best terms; "in fact, I told them to treat you as they would treat me. I also added, that when the work was completed I should examine it myself to see it was properly done."
"The disadvantage," proceeded Mr. Lauston, in his clear, legible, gentlemanly handwriting, "of doing business with ladies usually, is their utter lack of the most rudimentary commercial knowledge.
"Things which men accept as matters of course fill the minds of the better sex with astonishment.
"You, however, who are possessed of more solid common sense than any lady I ever previously had the happiness of meeting, will, I am convinced, accept my assurances that I have acted throughout the whole of this transaction rather as if you were my client than my tenant.
"I have endeavoured to make matters as pleasant and easy for you as possible; and when you comprehend more thoroughly the exceeding cheapness of the place you have rented, you will, I trust, do me justice, and restore me to that place in your esteem which, from some chance expressions in your note, I fear I have, through no fault of my own, forfeited.
"Believe me, however, I have your interests earnestly at heart, and that it will give me the greatest satisfaction at all times to be of any service to you or yours.
"I am, my dear Miss Vernam,
"Most faithfully yours,
"R. D. Lauston."
"What'll we do now?" asked my sister.
I made no immediate answer, but opened my desk, and taking out the duplicate agreement which Mr. Lauston had handed to me, read it carefully over.
This I had not done previously. The "heads" Mr. Lauston sent us we carefully considered and discussed; but the more formal document was signed in faith and haste.
"Should you care to look it over?" Mr. Lauston had suggested lightly.
"It is not necessary, I suppose?" was my foolish answer.
"Not necessary, of course. It merely embodies the terms we agreed upon, and if not signed today, it cannot be done for a fortnight, as I am going out of town, and must be at London Bridge Station in a quarter of an hour. Jones, fetch me a cab. Shall we let the matter stand over, Miss Vernam?"
"We had better settle the affair now, I think," I answered; and before I could think again a pen was placed in my fingers, the papers were signed and witnessed, and Mr. Lauston was putting on his gloves.
"Good-bye, Miss Vernam," he said; "I must be off now. Be sure and let me know if I can assist you in any way. Good-bye, again."
It had never occurred to me that the document I signed might contain very different provisions from those agreed upon between Mr. Lauston and myself; but now, as I conned the paragraphs slowly and at my leisure, I began to think that the Mill House might prove an expensive residence.
"I am afraid, Georgie, that I have been very foolish," I remarked at length; and then she came and sat down beside me, and we went carefully over the paper together; I pointing out such passages as filled me with dread forebodings, Georgie shaking her head, and sighing at not infrequent intervals.
"I wonder if Mr. Lauston is an honest man," she said at last, meditatively.
"I am sure I cannot tell," I answered. "All I know is, I have been a very silly woman."
"Mrs. Shooter says," proceeded my sister, ignoring my remark as irrelevant, "that when Shooter asked if fifty pounds rent was to include the gardens, Mr. Lauston said 'Yes,' and never mentioned a word about premium. Mr. Lauston did say he would not be troubled letting the place for less than seven years; but, first or last, a premium was never named."
"And the inference you draw, Georgie?"
"Is that I believe Mr. Lauston has cheated you."
"But, my dear, consider. Half a dozen drawings are not an enormous premium to pay for such a place as this. Mr. Berners would only give me ten, or at most twelve pounds for all of them."
"I think Mr. Berners is cheating you also."
"That is the evil, you see, of once beginning to suspect people, and attribute bad motives to them," I remarked sagely. "I confess this business about the repairs does trouble and perplex me; but still, I prefer to imagine there has been some misunderstanding rather than a deliberate system of deceit. As for Mr. Berners, of course he gets more money for my work than he gives me. If he did not, how could he afford to pay me at once, and keep his shop open, and meet rent and taxes, and the wages of his employés? For the present, Georgie, I am satisfied about Mr. Berners, and in a few days I intend to satisfy myself also about Mr. Lauston."
"What do you mean, Peg?"
"Why, I shall see a solicitor."
"Oh!" said my sister, and in that "oh!" she managed to concentrate an amount of fear, admiration, and despair, which could only have had its origin in a spirit of prophecy, since legal perplexities were just those which hitherto had never troubled our repose.
"Now, I have got an idea in the way of a picture, which I mean to realize," I said, not caring to pursue the Lauston question further.
"A moment first, Peg," said Georgie, "I did not repeat all Mrs. Shooter told me. Her words were, 'Though I am glad to see the place occupied, I am main sorry you ladies, which are ladies, has took it. I am afraid he' (Mr. Lauston) 'will get you into trouble of some sort. My husband, he would be mad if he knew I was speaking to you as I am, for the master promised him a golden sovereign the day the house were let, but I feel as if I can't contain myself. He's a bad man, Mr. Lauston, a cruel bad man, and if your sister wants to know what I mean, let her come and ask me.'"
"It happens," I remarked, "that my ideal picture cannot be completed without Mrs. Shooter's assistance, so I can ascertain her meaning when I go to implore her help."
"Peg."
"Yes, dear."
"Because I was foolish enough to fall in love with this place, we are not to grow different to each other."
Different! ah, no, unless, indeed, my sister, to love you a hundred times more, to think better of you in every respect, were to grow different!
"You naughty girl," I said, "to make me cry."
"Poor me!" she answered, "to have made you cry."
And so we embraced and kissed, and wiped away the tears drawn from a deeper fount of sorrow than our light words might have seemed to touch, and I said,
"Now I am going for Mrs. Shooter's baby."
"What in the world, Peg, can you want with Mrs. Shooter's baby?"
"I am going to make a picture; wait until you see it. If Mr. Lauston has troubled me with doubts, his place has inspired me with ideas."
"May I come with you?"
"If you like."
So together we set out, wandering down the road and across the meadows, hand clasped in hand, like a couple of children.
I do not know, Georgie, how it was you seemed to grow so inexpressibly dear to me all of a sudden.
Perchance it was some fresh charm of manner developed, some fresh grace of mind become more prominent, perhaps it might be that seeing you after months of repression in a more fitting frame-work, your beauty seemed to me more beautiful!
I know not, my sister, how it was, unless—indeed, it might be the prescience that you could not remain mine only much longer—but you grew to my thinking sweeter and fairer with each passing hour.
I can pause in my story, and look at you just as you were then. Such as was the talent given me, it did not lie much in the direction of figure-drawing, yet I had in those days a knack of catching a likeness which I sometimes search for in vain amongst the portraits limned by those who have taken high rank in their profession.
Slight as the sketch is, I have but to lift my eyes, and see you, my sister, as you were then, in the lovely summer weather, when, for mere delight in reproducing your beauty, I painted your dear self.
There, with the rose-blush colour on your cheek and a laughing light in your sweet eyes, with a gossamer scarf thrown over your head, just as by the merest charm it arranged itself, with a tangle of vine tendrils and climbing convolvuli, and clustering berberries and starry-white roses, all massed together for a background, and the rippling stream at your feet, you look down at me with the merry loving glance of old; and the past, when you were still all mine own, comes back to me, and whilst I rejoice to know you are happy with one who fills your life as I never could have done, I cannot refrain sometimes from sighing when I think of my own existence, which would oftentimes be dreary and empty were it not for the Art that even in the darkest and loneliest hours has stood so steadfastly my friend.
The water was pouring through the holes in the picturesque but useless old lock as Georgie and I approached Mr. Shooter's cottage.
The bees were humming in the garden, the flowers were all ablaze with colour, the peace of the scene was wonderful, even the two small children turned out "to play" seemed infected by it, and stood quietly gazing at the river floating away.
Mrs. Shooter herself was in an agony of cleaning, the parlour furniture blocked up the passage, and the kitchen chairs and tables were out in the yard.
"I am in a terrible muddle, ladies," she explained; "I had the sweep here last night and a bit of whitewashing done this morning. Steve, he be gone to Eddingfold, to take the turn of one of his mates as have met with an accident, and I thought it was a rare good chance to have a turn-out. There is no place to ask you to sit indoors, but it's pleasant out on the grass."
She was dusting and bringing out chairs for us as she spoke, but I stopped her hospitable intentions.
"I have only come to borrow your baby, Mrs. Shooter," I explained, "I want to sketch him. We will take the greatest care of him and bring him back to you safe and sound in less than an hour."
"As for that, Miss," answered Mrs. Shooter, her face dimpling with delight, "you're welcome to him for the day. I'll just clean him up and put a tidy frock on him, and Marianne shall carry him round."
"We can carry him ourselves, Mrs. Shooter, thank you; and as for dress, I want him just as he is lying now in his cradle, all tumbled and happy. You shall have a portrait of him to hang up in your parlour. There, you see what a nurse my sister is!"
For already Georgie had the lovely little fellow in her arms, his face all flushed with recent sleep, his hair tossed about his forehead, his dimpled fists clenched in the exuberance of his delight at being tossed deftly backward and forward, his fat little legs and pink toes appearing under the short white gown his mother had wished to change.
Simply he was beautiful, as so often the very young children of the poor are.
Not very long ago, I saw him again, an ungainly youth with large ears and a shock head, and his other belongings to match, and I thought if his mother's eyes saw him as mine did, it had been a false kindness to present her with that picture of infantile grace and beauty.
"What are you going to do with him, Peg?" asked Georgie, as we left the lock-house behind.
"Wait and see," I answered, laughing; and so we walked on, my sister talking to the child, and cooing over him with that instinct of maternity which was a part and parcel of her nature from the time when she had her first rag doll, and went to sleep with the limp creature clasped in her arms, for fear any evil should happen to it in the night.
"Mrs. Shooter was too busy today to enlarge upon her antipathy to Mr. Lauston," I remarked, during a pause in Georgie's lavish caresses. "And I am rather glad matters so turned out; for I feel as if I would rather not hear evil of our landlord. For good or for ill, we must be his tenants for seven years, and it is as well not to begin with a prejudice against him."
"But about the repairs?" suggested my sister, who in some matters was wonderfully practical.
I feel as I look around on this beautiful country—as I listen to the murmuring of the streams—as I perceive something urging me on to work, something I never understood before stirring whatever of energy and talent there is in me—that I can forgive the landlord many a sin for the sake of his place.
"After all, you see, Georgie," I went on, "it is a mere question of money, and if I am strong to labour, if I can turn out work which must sell, what is the use of fretting about money?"
"Oh, do look at that woman!" whispered Georgie, shrinking close to me, and directing my attention to an old hag who was walking on the grass on the further side of the road, and regarding my sister and the child she carried with a curious and evil gaze; "is not she like a witch?"
"Poor soul!" I said; "if she be a witch, her craft has not done much for her. She seems half starved."
Immediately, moved by a sudden impulse, Georgie turned back.
The woman was standing still gazing after us; and when Georgie advanced towards her, she remained quite motionless, waiting.
"What is this for?" she asked, looking first at the piece of silver offered to her, and then at my sister's face.
"I beg your pardon; I did not know; I thought perhaps you might be in want of it; I did not mean to annoy you."
"Oh! I won't refuse it, bless you," she said, but her tone had no sound of blessing in it. "If but for the rarity of anybody offering aught to me, I'll take your money and thank you. That's not your own baby you are covering up so snug, is it?"
"Mine! oh, no!" and Georgie laughed at the idea, blushing, as was her pretty habit, also.
"I thought you looked too happy for it to be your own," answered the woman bitterly. "Well, I thank you, miss. Though I am not a beggar, I can use your gift, and I hope you'll never be the poorer for it;" and with these words, and a parting scowl at me, she wended her way along the path we had just traversed.
"Not a very gracious sort of personage," observed Georgie.
"She has once been better off," I answered; "people talk a good deal of nonsense, I fancy, about the 'uses of adversity.' As a rule, I do not think those uses tend much to increase geniality of manner."
"Now I shall see what you are going to do with Master Shooter," said Georgie, as I opened the gate leading into the garden.
"Yes, give him to me now;" and I led her to a shady spot beside the stream, where there was quite a little thicket formed of reeds and rank grass, and meadow-sweet, and foxglove, and water-bitney, and forget-me-not, and in the middle of this, with the bells of the foxglove nodding over him, and the rushes murmuring a plaintive lullaby, I laid the child on a cushion of yielding moss.
"Now, Georgie," I said.
My sister clasped her hands together in delight, and I knew my idea would be a success.
It was.
Here I may as well get rid of that portion of my story which relates merely to pecuniary matters.
After we went to the Mill House we prospered. Whatsoever my mind conceived and my fingers executed seemed at once to turn into gold.
A cluster of fern leaves, a waggon loaded with felled trees, a curve of the river where reeds grow unheeded, and broken branches torn in the winter from ancient willow trees lay across the water, forming unwonted eddies in the stream!
Whatever I touched proved successful.
For my models I did not then go far afield. Round and about our dwelling lay material in plenty. The Surrey landscape, as it appears and reappears in Academy pictures, I left untouched.
I chose humbler and more virgin soil.
I tried to arrest the thousand varying effects of light, to press the changing cloud illusions into my service, to depict the flecked sky as it appeared mirrored in the rivers.
Very unambitious were my subjects, but I fancy I understood them, and perhaps the public liked their very simplicity.
At any rate, the drawings sold, and I, with the fever of work upon me, toiled on at my labour of love, knowing no weariness, desiring no rest.
I was prospering, and the summer days seemed all too short for the completion of the tasks I set myself.
In an old portfolio I found some sketches made in Yorkshire, and from these I elaborated half a dozen landscapes, which enabled me to pay Mr. Lauston his pound of flesh without delay.
I paid also for the paper-hangings, the repairs of various locks, and the replacement of numerous slates.
Further, I settled the costs of preparing that lease which Mr. Lauston hoped would deliver me over bound into his hands.
"You see, Miss Vernam, the danger of contracting engagements without consulting a solicitor," remarked the legal gentleman whose advice I sought concerning the papers I had signed.
As he, however, managed to run up a tolerably heavy bill on the foundation of this indiscretion, a bill which seemed to me like a ten-page piece of music cunningly constructed upon an air only sixteen bars long, I could not avoid considering whether it might not be as dangerous sometimes to take a gentleman versed in the law into one's confidence as to refrain from doing so.
BEFORE we had been two months in the new home I offended Mr. Lauston, and our servant suddenly left our service.
Of these events I must speak in the order in which they occurred.
Although it seemed impossible to doubt that Mr. Lauston had exercised a considerable amount of diplomacy in that matter of the premium, and that other matter of the repairs, to say nothing of getting me to pay three years' rent in advance, still I did not quarrel with him Concerning his sharp practice.
In fact, unless a woman had developed the temper and courage of a perfect virago, I fail to see how, so long as he chose to preserve peace, war could have been declared.
Never was there a man so full of pleasant utterances—never did there exist a man more gifted with delusive frankness of manner and the happy facility of always placing himself in the right.
I did not believe in him—not one bit.
Even when he was telling me something which sounded like truth, I put no faith in his utterances.
His compliments vexed me, his offers of service annoyed me, his advice irritated me; and yet I could not quarrel with him.
He was always so plausibly friendly, so suavely courteous, that to repel him I felt it would be necessary to become rude myself.
Nevertheless, that difficulty had eventually to be encountered.
Mr. Lauston began to come too often, far too often, to the Mill House.
Under the pretence that "tradespeople would be tradespeople," that "we, of course, knew nothing about how work should be done," that "it was improbable we understood anything about cropping a kitchen garden, or the sort of vegetables our ground was capable of growing," he "dropped in" upon us continually.
True, he said he had business in the neighbourhood, a statement which I, at the time, imagined to be utterly false, but which I understood subsequently was perfectly correct.
"How are you getting on, my dear Miss Vernam?" he was wont to say. "I found I had an hour to spare at Maytree, and so just ran over to see whether Wimple's people were treating you fairly. Ah, a pretty paper, a very sweet, pretty paper, indeed. But I fear they have been charging you high for it."
And so on ad libitum.
On these occasions, if I did not invite Mr. Lauston to partake of a cup of tea, he asked me to give him one, or rather he asked Georgie, and she, whom he amused and pleased (in spite of all her prepossessions to the contrary) with his talk, which was indeed plausible enough to have "wiled a bird off the tree," was wont with her own hands to bring in a tiny tray, which Mr. Lauston said "delighted his eyes."
It was my pretty sister who accomplished that feat, however—my dear, innocent, unsuspecting darling! and sometimes, when I caught his eyes following her lissom figure, his glance riveted upon her lovely face, my heart seemed to stand still in an agony of apprehension.
For by this time I had heard much about Mr. Lauston, of his evil life, his vindictiveness, his habit of overreaching—heard more fully how he had robbed the Dingleys—robbed and cast them forth. How he had sent an old servant, and a young girl, his niece, to reside for seven years in a house around which the evil aroma of the sins he had committed clung with a curious persistency. How the old servant was a woman of an unscrupulous nature, who conformed to all his whims; how, between them and the loneliness of her life, the niece was driven mad, and had to be conveyed to an asylum.
"He would drive me mad if I were connected with him," I thought, looking one day at his face, so blandly calm, so beamingly civil, "and even as matters are, I must end this."
"Will you walk round the garden, Miss Vernam?" said the subject of my thoughts at this juncture; "I should like to show you the border I consider best adapted for sowing early peas."
We went out together, over the lawn across the bridge.
"You wanted to speak to me, Mr. Lauston," I suggested, as we paced the walk by the river.
"Nay, Miss Vernam; was it not rather you who wished to speak to me?" and he removed a piece of bramble from my path with the courtesy of a Raleigh.
"I imagined you wished to speak to me," he repeated, finding I did not immediately answer.
"You have a singular knack of reading one's thoughts," I remarked.
"Yours is such an expressive countenance, that it would be difficult to avoid reading your thoughts," he answered.
These were the sort of speeches he always made to me when we were alone, and I felt the treacherous colour rising in my cheeks as I said:
"Then you have read also, I presume, what it is I desire to say to you."
"Ah! your manner told me that more certainly even than your face."
"I hope—I trust—" I was beginning to stammer, when he interrupted me.
"You have only been what you must always be, charming. If anything could increase my regret for the sentence of banishment which I feel is going to be pronounced, it would be the tender grace that has striven to prepare me for the shock."
I felt strong enough and brave enough by the time he had finished this sentence to say what I deemed it only right to tell him.
"You must see clearly," I remarked, "how we are situated, and how imprudent it would be for two young women—"
"Young girls," he amended, with a pensive smile.
"Living quite alone, to act in direct defiance to the opinions of the world."
"You are perfectly right," he replied. "Though you know no one in the neighbourhood, and are not likely to know anyone, for this is not a place where people develop much friendly feeling towards strangers; though it is most improbable that a single human being is aware of my visits, though I am old enough to be your grandfather, and have never entertained a thought concerning you and your sister inconsistent with the highest respect and esteem it is possible for one human being to feel for another, still you are perfectly right. Ladies should always consider, and I fancy always do consider, rather what 'might be' than what 'is.'"
"I am not quite certain that I fully understand your meaning," I said, answering rather the covert sneer in his tone than the words he spoke, "but I understand my own meaning perfectly, and it is this—that as a woman can never afford to despise the opinion even of strangers, she should act more circumspectly when surrounded by persons who know nothing of her antecedents, than when living amongst her own friends."
"In plain English, the Misses Vernam consider it right and necessary to be more particular as to the visitors they tolerate in Surrey than they would in Yorkshire."
"I think that is my idea."
"And as we have become acquainted here instead of there, I am to be the sufferer. Nay, I am not going to pain you by asking for a mitigation of my sentence. Your friendship has been very pleasant to me—how pleasant you can never know. I am a lonely man, Miss Vernam; when I leave my office, there are no bright faces to welcome my return home. I had a niece once, but—No, I shall never pass such hours again—yet you are right, as you always must be right. Keep a kindly recollection of me if you can, and remember if I can ever serve you that my time and everything I possess is at your disposal. With your permission, I will not go into the house again. I feel myself unequal to formal leave-taking. I may pass out of Paradise through this gate, may I not? Thank you—a thousand times, thank you. Good-bye. God bless you."
He took my hand in both of his and pressed it tenderly. This time I was not mistaken, and I had not been mistaken as to the incident in his office.
Yet after that he had cheated me; and though a woman may forgive being made love to, even though the love be made in a most offensive fashion, or being cheated, if it so happens that the love-making and the cheating have been enacted by the same person, she never forgives and she never forgets!
As I closed the gate behind Mr. Lauston, I seemed to breathe more freely.
At last I acknowledged to myself that I had been afraid of him, afraid to speak openly, afraid of giving offence.
"He took it very well," I thought, "and I am glad he will not have an opportunity of holding my hand again for some time to come."
This interview occurred on a Tuesday. On the Saturday following, Mr. Lauston was again announced.
When he entered, I was alone in the room overlooking the river, painting busily.
"Do not condemn me unheard," he said, deprecatingly, answering the astonishment he must have seen written on my face.
"I am here on business, strictly upon business," he went on. "I did not like to write to you, because one never knows into whose hand a letter may fall; but Wimple was with me this morning."
"Indeed!" I remarked.
"Yes; you know how stupid country people are. I make no apology for telling you his business, because you have such excellent sense. You are in every respect—"
"If Mr. Wimple's business with you concerned me, I wish you will tell me at once what he said," I interrupted, ruthlessly cutting across the familiar formula.
"Well, the fact is, he had got a little frightened about his account, and so he came to me to make inquiries. I need not repeat what I said, but if you have had any trouble with him, you will have no more; you can take your own time about settling his account."
For a moment I sat stupefied, amazed at the deceit of the man who told me all this without a change of countenance.
"I really was more annoyed than I can express, Miss Vernam," he resumed, but I stopped him with a question—
"Mr. Wimple was with you yesterday, did you say?"
"I really did not imagine you would allow so slight a matter to vex you so much, or I should never have mentioned it."
I did not answer; I felt too thoroughly disgusted for words.
Walking across the room, I opened a cabinet, and took from thence a folded paper, which I handed to Mr. Lauston.
It was Mr. Wimple's receipt, dated a week previously.
"You have made some mistake," I said, as quietly as I was able, but I heard that my voice trembled when I spoke the words.
He opened the paper and looked at it, and I saw his face change.
If I had dealt him a blow, it would not have altered his face one half so much.
He did not expect it; the last thing he imagined possible was in fact what had occurred.
The very day Mr. Wimple sent in his bill I had paid it.
The account arrived in the morning, and having to purchase some goods at Eddingfold in the afternoon, I called and got rid of that debt at the same time.
After such a fiasco even Mr. Lauston was silent for a few moments; then he said
"There has been, as you remark, some great mistake. I must see Wimple about the matter."
"I do not think that can be necessary," I said with a sneer I was at no pains to repress.
"Pardon me, Miss Vernam, I consider it quite necessary," and rising, he thrust his hands in his pockets, and strode towards one of the windows.
To reach it he was compelled to pass by a small music-stand on which that very morning I had placed a drawing elaborated for my own satisfaction.
He was not thinking of paintings at the moment, but this chanced to catch his eye.
"Good heavens! where did you know that man?" he exclaimed, pausing suddenly before it.
"Why?" I asked.
He did not answer for a moment; then:
"Bah! it is nonsense," he said; but I could see he eyed me furtively, and wiped drops of perspiration off his forehead as he spoke. "You never could have known him. He was dead when—he died, that is, years ago."
"Possibly," I answered, the while I experienced a grovelling sort of terror which almost deprived me of speech. "Nevertheless, I saw him the day after we came down here."
"Saw him—where?"
"Standing under a pine tree, looking down on the old mill."
"Ah! Miss Vernam, it is your turn to make mistakes now," he answered, with a sickly smile. "That man has been dead enough this many a day."
"Then he must have risen from the dead," I retorted, "for I saw him distinctly the very first day I sketched the mill."
"Really, for a lady possessed of such marvellous good sense and remarkable talent—"
"Mr. Lauston," I interrupted, "on the very day after we came down here to live I saw that man as distinctly as I see you now—so distinctly that, as you observe, I have painted his features from memory. The original sketch I sold to Mr. Berners."
"He gave you a good price for it, I trust?"
"I was satisfied," was my answer.
"I must beg a thousand pardons for having wasted so much of your valuable time," said Mr. Lauston, who still looked white, even to his lips.
"I pray you will not mention it," I said.
"You are always kind, Miss Vernam, but I feel I ought to intrude no longer."
I did not ask him to remain; I felt I could not do so.
"Good-bye," he said, with that smile I both feared and detested curling his lips.
"Good-bye," I answered.
Then he just touched the hand I offered—offered in spite of myself—and was gone, and I understood I had made an enemy for life.
"Never mind," thought I, courageously; "an open enemy is better than a false friend any day."
WHEN Mary brought in the kettle for tea, I said to her:
"Mary, if Mr. Lauston should call again, will you say I am engaged?"
The girl turned round with the kettle still in her hand, her manner very confused, her face very red, and answered:
"Oh! miss, if you please, miss, I am very sorry, miss, I am sure, but I should like to leave."
"Like to leave!" I repeated, stupefied.
My experiences hitherto had not lain in those pastures where servants, merely coming in to graze, leave at the shortest notice.
With us at Grangedale, nothing save marriage or death, or the misfortunes which finally cast us adrift, had parted any faithful servant from our service, and really, Mary being a nice trim maiden, willing and useful, I had looked upon her as a fixture for some time to come, at all events.
"If you please, miss," said Mary, in reply, and sat down the kettle, "and, miss—"
"Yes, Mary."
"If it won't ill-convenience you very much, I'd like to go this evening."
"This evening, Mary! why, you must be mad!"
"No, miss—I think not, miss—leastways not now," said Mary, recovering herself, and hitting hard at what she considered the vulnerable part of our armour. "I don't object, miss, to a country place as is country, with the houses of gentlefolk all about, and gentlefolk a-coming and a-going, but I never before did take a situation in a wilderness, and I never will again."
"That will do, Mary," I answered. "You can, of course, go as soon as you like."
"What in the world are we to do?" said Georgie, in despair, after the girl had left the room.
"Look our position in the face," I said, ruefully, but still, I trust, with some trace of the courage which had stood us Vernams in good stead when fighting for king and country, when standing at bay for God and the right.
Yes, I can honestly say, I never before felt the blood tingle so sharply at my fingers' ends; never comprehended with what a wealth of daring it might fill even a woman's veins, as when I fully realized I had made an enemy, and understood the defection of Mary to mean the beginning of a war of petty annoyances.
I was but a woman, yet I had come of "decent people," and I did not mean to bring discredit on my ancestry.
Thoroughly I understood Mr. Lauston meant to weary us of the Mill House; thoroughly I made up my mind that I would starve sooner than surrender.
Nevertheless, that night my nerves did receive a fearful shock.
Remember we were quite alone in the house, Georgie and I.
Our sleeping apartments joined, and as we had heaps of spare apartments, the dressing-rooms lay to right and left of our bed-chambers.
Thus, I slept and dressed over the studio, and Georgie lodged in greater state, went to bed in the apartment above the drawing-room, and adorned her sweet loveliness in a little chamber looking out over the drive.
I had so planned it.
Any front view seemed more cheerful for my darling than that sorrowful water and drear expanse of meadow land.
About eleven we went to bed, and I soon fell asleep.
In Surrey, sleep came to me easily, if not pleasantly, as it does to most who live there. Were I a doctor, I would make my fortune by buying up property in the Surrey lowlands, and sending all patients suffering from insomnia to that air.
Sleep! Dear friends, there amongst the reeds is the true Lotus-land. There you may fling chloral to the winds, and scoff at morphia.
The trouble is not to go to sleep, but to keep awake—at least, so I have ever found it—and the change is great from London, where most people toss restlessly through the night watches, to those dreamy valleys where fanned by southwest breezes, and hushed by the murmur of many waters, and the whispering of the rushes, the eyelids close naturally, and the spirit floats away without an effort into the realm of unreality.
Well, I slept, for a time soundly, heavily; then I began to dream.
I dreamt it was a wild, wet evening; with grey clouds lying across a lowering sky, and night coming on, that night which we see in sleep but never when we are awake.
I could feel the rain beating upon my face, and the wind tossing my hair, and I seemed to stand on a shelving piece of greensward, sloping down to a broad sheet of water, in the middle of which was an island covered with willows, and wild flowers and weeds.
Close upon the brink grew a great tree, and to that tree was moored a punt, the bottom of which was full of water.
The wind was bringing it round, with its broadside almost against the bank, and as I stepped into it I could hear the suck, suck of the water coming in through the leak beside the locker.
I do not know when the boat was unfastened, or how it chanced that all at once the current seemed to turn, but in a moment we glided from shore, and the punt swung round, as in the manner of punts, into deeper water, then the wind rose again, and the rain began to fall more heavily.
I could see the great drops splashing into the water around, and into that lying at the bottom of the boat, and I was wondering what I should do, when another current caught the boat, spun it round, and dashed it broadside once more against the bank, some distance from the tree whence we had started.
With a great sense of relief, I was in the very act of picking up the chain, ere springing to land, when the distance between the punt and the bank widened; in another second we were out in the widest part of the lake, the wind howling and the rain pouring in torrents, the punt now turning this way, now that, so that one minute I saw the island and the next the tree and the bank; the water began to rise in the boat, the further end was dipping down to its gunwale, then the gunwale was under water.
In desperation I threw all my weight back on the seat, endeavouring to right the boat, but the water came over it.
I could feel it soaking my feet, then splashing above my ankles, then touching my knees, then there was a lurch, another turn, a fiercer blast of wind than ever, followed by rain which seemed to be poured out of buckets, then the boat went from under me, and in semi-darkness I was struggling in the midst of the flood, reaching out my hands for something to grasp, and meeting nothing, nothing save the water in which I was sinking.
At that moment I awoke, with the sound of a shriek ringing in my ears.
Could I have uttered it?
I was still half asleep—and had the confused feeling of being still out in the water clinging to me; the wind had changed, and was howling down the chimney, and the rain was beating against the window facing the north.
I sat up in bed and listened.
My hair was dripping just as if I had been in the river, and my linen wet and clammy.
I never remembered to have been in such a perspiration in all my life before.
Hark!—what on earth could it be?—a shrill, penetrating cry, which rose above the noise of the wind and the rain.
"Peg," cried my sister at this juncture; "Peg, are you awake? did you hear that? what can it be?"
She came running from her room to mine, her bare feet falling noiselessly on the carpet, her near presence only to be guessed by the tones of her voice as she crossed to my side.
"I heard it twice; did you?" she went on. "The first time I was asleep, and it woke me; what can it be?"
"Someone in great distress," I answered, hurriedly slipping on a dressing wrapper, and then rushing to the window overlooking the river.
Thrusting the curtains aside and drawing up the blind, I threw the sash wide and looked out, Georgie leaning over my shoulder and striving to look out also.
Not a sound to be heard save the pelting of the rain and the howling of the wind.
Nothing to be seen save the rushing river and the meadows beyond, and the gardens, where not even a bird was yet astir.
Far away in the east there appeared some streaks of light, showing that morning would soon be breaking; but it was still impossible to discern far-away objects distinctly, and it was only through a blurred grey misty atmosphere I could make out the half-dead willow tree on the opposite bank, with its broken branches trailing in the river, the line of distant hedges, the sunken barge three parts under water, and the sullen, swollen stream flowing faster than I had ever before beheld it, speeding along.
"Did anyone call?" I cried as loud as I could shout; but the wind caught the sound of my voice and flung it back to me, and the dripping rain alone returned an answer.
"Let me try," said Georgie, and putting both her hands to her mouth, like a boy, she sent a clear, sharp cry out into the grey wet morning.
Thrice more she repeated her signal, and then a fourth time she essayed to make herself heard.
"Does anyone want help?"
"So many thousands that no one will answer," I remarked. "It must have been some bird; let us shut the window."
But at that moment there rose and stood on the top of the cabin of the sunken barge a human figure; it rose dark and indistinct in the uncertain light, half obscured by the willow branches drooping over the old boat, but certainly a human figure.
"What is that, Georgie?" I asked; "there, standing on the barge?"
"I see nothing," she answered.
"Right under the furthest branch; it is moving now again."
"There is nothing whatever on the barge," she persisted.
"But, Georgie, just look steadily at that willow for a minute. Stand where I am; now you can better see the part of the barge which is out of the water."
"I can see it distinctly, and there is nothing on it, not even a rat. Your sight is not so long as mine, and it has confused the shadows. Shut your eyes for a moment, and you will see for yourself; there is not a living creature in sight."
I did as she advised, I turned my back to the wind and the rain and closed my eyes, then turning suddenly, I opened them again.
There lay the barge, solitary, desolate, there dropped the willow boughs, but sign of life there was none.
And yet I had seen that figure distinctly, as distinctly as I had beheld the lonely watcher under the pine trees.
Good heavens! was it that in the stories told about the place there lay some germ of truth?
Was it that the river refused to hold its mysteries; that the dead who had been sinned against could not rest quiet, though the trouble was past and over; was it that to me was given the power of seeing things to others mercifully invisible; that to this silent lonely house I had come with the purpose, all unknown to myself, of righting some wrong still remediable, of frustrating some wickedness still in progress?
I closed the window and stood silent.
"You look quite pale, dear," said my sister, "and you are shivering with cold."
I did not answer, I could not speak a word.
To avoid further discussion I let her lead me back to bed and wrap the clothes around me.
"Poor old darling, you are still shivering," cried Georgie, as she kissed my lips, and then, instead of returning to her own room, she lay down beside me, and all through the morning watches I could look at her sweet face, placid in slumber, with a feeling of rest to my own tired eyes, to which no sleep would come.
THE whole of that day it rained, rained with a good even persistency which might have excited admiration even in a native of Ireland.
There was not a gleam of sunshine, not a break in the gloom of that leaden sky.
About eleven the wind lulled, but the rain poured down in fiercer torrents than ever.
Across the meadows came the sound of the church bells, but nothing else broke the stillness.
Even the usually irrepressible thrushes were silent, and as for our cocks, they had not a crow left in them.
A few adventurous chickens ventured out and crossed the yard in search of stray worms, but they soon retreated to the shelter of an empty barn with drooping tails and saturated plumage.
"I wish we had some ducks to look at," sighed Georgie. "The pleasure ducks take in being out in the wet is quite inspiriting."
How lonely the house seemed!
I never imagined one servant could have made such a difference.
When I went through the kitchen to the larder, my footsteps awakened hollow echoes—echoes I could not recollect having noticed on a few occasions Mary had been absent during her residence with us.
"I shall get afraid!" I thought, "if I give way to these feelings," so although there existed no real necessity for me to do anything of the sort, I kindled a large fire in the range, and kept myself busy with faddling about this piece of work and that.
Neither Georgie nor I understood much about cooking, but still I determined to provide just the dinner Mary should have served for us.
With the best intentions, however, the repast did not prove quite a success.
The meat was raw, and the tart burnt, and the potatoes—well, the potatoes were not mealy.
"It is quite clear that I had better not abandon the pencil for the spit," I remarked to Georgie, whose offers of assistance I had rejected with scorn; but though we laughed at my failure, I imagine the utter badness of our mid-day meal did not tend to raise our spirits.
"Do not let us ever try to do anything more in that way," suggested Georgie. "We had better stick to tea; we can make that, and I am sure we don't want meat and pastry."
"It is to be hoped we do not, unless we can manage to eat both uncooked," I replied.
"What could have induced Mary to serve us such a trick?" marvelled my sister.
"Possibly the monotony of Sundays without a young man. Most likely she is now walking with some favoured swain through the Park under the shelter of his umbrella."
"I wonder when we shall be able to hear of someone else."
"Before we are starved, it is to be hoped. Meantime, let us be thankful we know how to light a fire."
The whole of that afternoon I sat with a book in my hand, reading, ostensibly, but really thinking—thinking.
Little as it may say either for my Christianity or my courage, I devoted most of the hours of one of the most wretched Sundays I ever spent in considering ways and means—in mentally adding and subtracting—in marvelling whether I could afford to quit the house, and leave Mr. Lauston, and the men and women he had wronged, to settle matters for themselves.
I was answerable for seven years' rent, and I paid one hundred and fifty pounds down in cash.
I had also spent as much as was prudent in furniture, and although that, of course, could be removed, still, I reflected, considerable expense would be incurred in doing so.
Then Mr Wimple's account, and the accounts of various other local tradespeople, had encroached still further upon the money I possessed; and last, but not least, if we left the Mill House, where were we to go?
Remembering the difficulty we had previously experienced in meeting with a residence to our minds, I shrank from encountering such an ordeal again.
Besides, where should we ever find another residence—so cheap, so pretty, so retired, and, after all, what were its drawbacks?
Summing them all up, I found they only amounted to these:
An evil reputation, caused by the evil doings of its owner.
For years the place had lain empty; and even around a house which has never been inhabited—never been tenanted by a sin or a sorrow, there always, if it remain long vacant, creeps some story of gloom and mystery to account for its avoidance.
What were the Dingleys to me, that I should dread to live in the place which had been theirs?
We were honest people—honestly paying our way, honestly working as hard, perhaps, as any Dingley ever worked; and, further, if wrong had been done, it had not been done by us.
Walking on the earth, or lying in their graves, what right had the Dingleys to interfere with our peaceable possession of their old residence?
Further, had they really interfered?
Seated before a magnificent wood fire, and soothed by the cup of tea which, as before hinted, never fails to exercise a soothing influence on my nerves and temper, I began to think I had been very foolish to permit myself to be disturbed by my imaginings, and by the stories Mrs. Shooter had repeated to me. If we were to believe every old woman's tale, it would be impossible for us to reside long in any house in England.
Taking my own senses as the only experience worth considering, what had I seen, heard, or felt, in the way of ghostly occupation, since we entered into possession of Mr. Lauston's eligible residence?
"Now, Margaret Vernam, be accurate," I said to myself; "what are the items, and what is the sum total of the evidence you have to offer in support of there being anything connected with this house besides the fancies of a foolish woman?"
Leaning back in my chair, looking at Georgie, half asleep sitting opposite to me, thinking of the pleasant haven we had found, after the confinement and discomfort of London lodgings, and the greater trial of advice from sympathizing friends, I could not but confess that the drawbacks attached to the Mill House were few and the advantages many.
The place was lonely—true; but was not that precisely the quality we had most desired? The place had an evil name. Yes; but was not that the reason why we were able to rent it for an almost nominal sum? The owner was a man with whom it was unpleasant to have close relations. That fact need not influence my reflections much, one way or other. I had managed, I felt, to put a stop to his visits; and as to money matters, why, the lease, which was strong to bind me, must bind him also. I had paid the premium in the form stipulated. I had paid three years' rent. For the present, at all events, we would put Mr. Lauston out of the question, more especially as, in searching for a better landlord, we might only be exchanging the frying-pan for the fire.
Well, and what remained?
I had seen a man whom Georgie could not see. A man who disappeared when I drew near him—a man who certainly answered to the description given me of Mr. Dingley—a man whose portrait I felt satisfied Mr. Lauston recognised.
The delusion, if it were a delusion, of beholding a man where no man stood, was remarkable; but then, all my life, imagination had been largely developed in me.
When I was quite a tiny little creature, I used to see figures in the clouds, faces in the fire, mountains in the evening darkness, waves and water where was nothing really save grass bending before the wind.
Where actual vision ended, and the tricks of fancy began, I never could tell for certain. First, because of this tendency to create spectres for myself; and secondly, because Georgie's sight was so much longer and surer than my own, that if, at a distance, I fancied I beheld, say a sister of charity, arrayed in spotless head-gear, I never could be quite certain till it drew close to me that the sister would not turn out a short-horn [cow], with a snow-white face.
My eyes were quite good enough to serve all purposes for which eyes are usually wanted, but I could not see a "crow flying over Hindir," as Georgie sometimes, in boastful jest, said she could do; and if circumstances had compelled me to set up for a wild Indian, I should have been nowhere.
Granting, however, that I was mistaken—that no man stood under the pine tree—that the whole affair had been a delusion of my senses, what became of the likeness to his former tenant which had so evidently shocked Mr. Lauston?
Distinctly I knew I had seen the man's features—so distinctly that I was able to transfer his face to canvas. Now, to what trick of the senses could I attribute this circumstance? Either I beheld the man, Dingley, in the flesh, or I did not. If I did, where did he come from? How did it chance a man, who had been dead for years, appeared before my eyes on the rising ground above the ruined mill? If I did not, whence came my knowledge of his face and of his dress? Even to a shoe-string, which was untied and hanging loose, I noticed his attire. Did I dream him? Did I imagine him? Had I, out of my own internal consciousness, unassisted by aught save vague descriptions, evolved the likeness of a man whose fortunes had been ruined, whose heart had been broken, whose life had been cut short, while I was still a child?
"I will leave that," I said half aloud.
"Eh?—leave what?" asked Georgie, dreamily. "Did you speak, Peg?"
"Not to you," I answered. "Go to sleep again."
Well, if I left that, what remained to disquiet me?—a cry before dawn—a figure standing on the submerged barge.
The first might have been the call of a bird, or the shout of a boy crossing the fields. How boys can shout!—how boys do scream! the hideous noises they are able to produce at will were idiosyncrasies in nature of which I had some knowledge.
As for the figure, Georgie failed to see it at all—and I could only see it dimly—so dimly, that when I came to think the matter over coolly, I decided it might have been an illusion produced by a mist wreath.
Or if not an illusion, it might have been the figure of some real person. Shooter said he believed a good deal of netting went on in this river. What more likely than that a poacher, having set his snares overnight, came down early to see what he had caught?
Why had not this idea occurred to me before—this easy and natural solution of the difficulty? Simply because I was nervous; because my interview with Mr. Lauston, and Mary's defection, had disturbed my mental equilibrium.
"We will not give up the house," I decided, looking out into the gathering gloom. "We will not run away beaten either by Mr. Lauston or a maid-of-all-work, so long as Georgie is not frightened. So long as the ghosts leave her in peace, and the Haunted River flows on, bringing no trouble to her, carrying no joy away from her, I will remain here, work hard, make money, and try to do the best I can. Last night I thought I would be courageous—now I say—'There, I give you my hand, Margaret Vernam, upon it.' You shall not turn coward, even if you feel inclined to do so. You shall stay and fight all enemies that may arise, and conquer Mr. Lauston, were he fifty times more anxious to get rid of you than he is."
For my instinct had told me Mr. Lauston did desire to get rid of me, and, ere long, I found my instincts were right.
As I ended my reverie and formed my decision, I fancied I heard a sound at the further end of the room. Turning round, it seemed to me that a shadow passed across the further window, that something flitted away when I rose from my chair.
"I do not believe it was anything, and at all events I shall not go out in this rain to see," I muttered; so without further incident that day drew to a close, and was succeeded by other days that passed likewise without adventure, save that one evening, when I was walking in the garden quite late, I saw a boat steal out from among the rushes, lower down the stream, and pull noiselessly up the river.
There were three men in it; through the gloom I could just distinguish so much—one steering, two rowing.
But what astonished me was that their oars made no sound; if I had been nervous then and inclined to be fanciful, I should have run in full of the idea that a phantom boat pulled by phantom rowers was gliding silently up the ghostly water.
As matters were, myself concealed, I stood and watched their progress, peering through the darkness.
For a minute it seemed as if they were intending to land on our side the river, but then the direction of the boat was changed. It shot right across the stream, the rowers shipped their oars, one of them laid his hand on the portion of the barge still above water, and another, I could discern, scrambled on the poop, and was lost amongst the willows.
Instantly almost he reappeared, carrying something in his arms.
"Take hold," he said, in a low tone, but the words came quite distinct across the water.
Carefully, as it seemed, the burden was laid down in the bows.
"All right, give way," someone said, and silently as it had come the boat disappeared, the darkness grew deeper; I could hear the sob of the water as it passed by the barge and got entangled amongst the willow branches.
"If ever I take a house again," I thought, "there shall not be a river within miles of it. On a bright summer's morning the water may be all very well, but on the dreary winter afternoons, in the gathering twilight, and through the long, long nights, it is terrible, in its mystery, its silence, and its strength."
AUTUMN, so far as the time of the year was concerned; summer, as regards the weather—summer only with crisp mornings and chilly evenings, with the russet colours on leaf, and stem, and trunk—with the faint-dying odour which, at the sinking of the sap, fills the air where pine woods abound—with blackberries darkening in the hedgerows, in lieu of buds opening into blossom—with nuts covering the trees in the copse where but a few months previously birds were building their nests!
Oak-apples and acorns were littering the ground, the bracken was turning brown, the rushes had all been cut down—the promise of the year had long been over—its fruition was almost done—a little while, and the rest of winter would be come.
It was just the weather for my work, not too warm for walking, not too cold for sketching.
The drawing I had done after we first came to Maytree was, though profitable, in some respects unsatisfactory.
Musician, author, painter, has at heart some ideal of a great labour to be undertaken, of a great success to be achieved; and just like the rest of my fellows, I had grown discontented with my more modest efforts, and desired to commence and finish something more ambitious than the "studies," "sketches," and so forth, which were bringing such good grist to the domestic mill.
I was difficult to please, I suppose; or else the very luxury of choice provided rendered selection hard; at all events, we walked far and wide before I could decide on a subject for the great work.
Sketches were made in abundance; sketches sufficient to give me employment for the whole winter, and if I could succeed in disposing of them, maintain us for a twelvemonth; but somehow I felt there must be that very landscape waiting for me somewhere; as a man sometimes feels just the face he could marry is dimpling, or laughing, or weeping, all unconscious of the heart-longings that will never be appeased till it becomes part and parcel of hope, and memory, and life.
At last we came upon it suddenly; a hill crowned with pine-trees, an old church nestling under their gloomy shadow, a stretch of sloping heath land, with a sandy road winding in wonderful curves beneath.
To the left a broad belt of common land, on which grew dwarf bushes of thorn, tangled all over with blackberry-canes, great masses of bracken, and dock, and thistle.
Elm-trees and a deep ditch, with a tall hedge of holly, beech, and red-wood, divided this strip of every-man's land from the fenced fields beyond, while for living interest, from a few cottages in the distance, where the road narrowed and the pines and the elms seemed to draw near together, the smoke rose straight into the clear evening air—some children were coming shouting down the hill from amongst the heather—a patient donkey was contemplating the scene from that strip of land which, for the nonce, was his, poor brute! and in the more immediate foreground a woman bent under a burden of bracken held by one hand across her shoulders, drawing with the other, by the aid of a rope, another great bundle along the yellow road behind her.
There were also the felled trees, the waiting waggon, the twisted branches hacked from the parent trunks, without which all woodland scenery seems more or less imperfect.
"This is what I have been looking for," I remarked to Georgie, and finding a lichen-covered root that served for a seat, I instantly opened my sketch-book, and began in all haste to trace the crone who gave at once additional picturesqueness and individuality to the scene.
"Oh, Georgie, she is going to turn down that lane!" I cried in an agony. "Run and tell her, if she will remain where she is for five minutes I will give her a shilling."
In our palmiest days my sister had been too much accustomed to execute errands of this description to hesitate about such a matter. Before I had finished my sentence she was off, and in another minute she waved her hand, by way of signal that she was successful.
I worked on: the woman showed no sign of haste or impatience. Georgie was talking to her; Georgie had the happy art of "talking to" people, and making them forget the passage of many five minutes.
At last, however, I called to her; then she turned and nodded, arranged the commercial part of the business, and came back to me walking slowly.
At the same time the children, who had paused on their way to skirmish through the heather at some game of running, and hiding, and catching, began to race down the declivity.
I could not have believed that such a small number of children could have made so great a noise.
At sound of the clatter behind her, the woman laden with and dragging the bracken looked behind, and immediately one of the girls—a bold, wild, impudent little brat—shouted out:
"Where are you taking that bracken, missus? where did you steal the bracken, witch?" questions which were gleefully echoed by the other children, some of whom began to dance up to and around the old creature they addressed.
"Go home, go home!" she said, raising her skinny arm, and threatening them with her fist.
"Go home yourself," answered a lad, mocking her voice, and then they all opened their mouths, and addressed her in language I never conceived could have been used by creatures of so tender an age.
They did not confine themselves to verbal abuse either: they flung twigs at her and dirt; they tore the bracken from its fastenings, and a regular mêlée was impending, for the woman had flung down the burden from her shoulders, when Georgie walked between the victim and her tormentors.
"Are you not ashamed of yourselves, you naughty children?" she cried; and at her words the little imps drew back a step or two.
But they soon rallied.
"Who are you?" asked one of the ringleaders derisively.
"Who are you?" echoed the girl who had commenced the attack, putting out her tongue.
"Never mind who we are," I said, reinforcing Georgie at this juncture; "but be quiet, and go home, or I shall call presently and see your mother, and complain to her about your behaviour."
"She ain't got no mother," jeered a small elfish-looking boy.
"Well, I suppose she and you, too, have got somebody who can give you a good whipping," I answered.
"Don't trouble yourself about them, miss," said the person who had excited their ire. "Stand aside for a minute while I curse them. They won't get up so lively in the morning after that, I can promise them."
I was shocked.
However admirable an institution cursing may have been at one period of the world's history, when, indeed, it seems to have been pretty freely resorted to, I had no desire to hear those thoughtless little children cursed at bed and at board, sleeping or waking, although they were sadly naughty, and had used some very dreadful expressions indeed.
"They will be good now, I think," I was commencing, when the woman interrupted me.
"Good! they will never be good, and they will never be quiet, till they are lying stretched out in their coffins. Let me speak to them, miss. They don't heed parent nor parson, but they will have to heed me. You, Bill Jakes, and you, Louisa Wisley—"
"What are you doing to the children?" interposed a man's voice, and uttering a fearful oath, a giant oath, compared to which the blasphemies of the smaller fry seemed like feeble pygmies, a man strode over a stile I had not before noticed, and came towards us.
Never, no never before had I imagined that such language could be addressed by one human being to another.
Georgie grew quite white with terror, and I felt myself shrinking as if a hail-storm was in progress.
But the woman at whom the words were hurled did not quail under them.
She stood looking at the speaker, while he piled epithet upon epithet, imprecation on imprecation, but she never attempted to arrest the torrent of his eloquence.
Indeed, it was noticeable, and I remarked the fact afterwards, though too horror-stricken to do so at the time, that she used no oaths herself, that except in an ecclesiastical and scriptural kind of way she never swore at all.
"Have you nearly done, Bob Adams?" she asked, when at length he paused to take breath. That was a group to contemplate at the time and recollect in the future.
"If I could ha' my will, I'd never ha' done till I saw you drownded in the pond, or burnt wi' faggots for th' witch ye are, you ——— you ——— you—;" blanks, which the reader, if he has ever resided in rural districts, can perhaps fill in for himself.
"Do you remember breaking your leg in the first frost last winter?" asked the woman.
"Aye, ——— you, it was your ——— doing."
"Take care, then," she said menacingly, her eyes flashing with an evil light, "that you don't break the other before the new year's in, and be sure, if you do, it is not in Squire Hartrey's woods looking after his longtails."
The man stood cowed and crestfallen.
She had hit some sore spot, I could see.
As for the children, they had backed a little from the centre of the battle-field, and were now watching the combatants with round eager eyes, and dirty fingers in most of their open mouths.
"Take care, Bob Adams. There are things done in your house you think nobody knows on but you and your wife and your wife's cousin, but I know them. I know where your last Sunday's dinner came from. I was there."
The man was beaten; nevertheless, he picked up courage enough to fling at her a parting oath.
"When you are hung, mother," he added, "I'll see you swing, if I have to tramp my way and beg my bread, and if I can get near enough, I'll give your legs a pull."
"The tree is cut down," she answered, gazing into the distance as though she beheld something tangible in the future, "and the saws are set for cutting it, and the place is ready for the gallows to be made firm and strong, but not for me. There is a man as is jealous of his wife—"
But Bob Adams waited to hear no more.
Muttering some profanity, he bade the children go home or it "would be the worse for them," and then, without looking once behind, climbed up the hill through the heather, and disappeared from sight.
The woman looked after him with a curious smile, but made no comment on what had occurred.
She began gathering her bracken together, and Georgie stooped to help tighten the rope which had slipped off.
"Have you far to take it?" I asked.
"Nearly a mile," was the answer.
"We will walk with you," I said, feeling it might be scarcely right for her to be left alone.
"No, thank you, miss; there's not one, unless it might be a senseless child, would lay a finger on me by day or by night. I am safe enough; but how could you tell what ill might happen to you if you got into company with an old witch."
"You don't suppose we believe in any of that sort of nonsense," exclaimed Georgie impulsively.
"Don't you, miss, or in ghosts, or anything of the kind?"
"No, certainly I do not."
"Nor your sister neither?" and she fastened her keen eyes on me.
"Oh! my sister is far braver than I am," answered Georgie, laughing.
She looked from Georgie to me, from me to Georgie again; then the wild expression left her face, and her voice softened as she answered—
"You have both of you courage enough, now. I hope you may always have it when you need it most. Though I am but a poor ignorant creature, I have often thought cowardice is the sin of the world; at any rate, I am sure it makes most of the trouble that is in the world. Now, I'll wish you good evening, and God take care of you."
I pressed more money upon her, but she refused to take it.
"Money is a great deal, but it is not everything," she said oracularly, and we parted.
"Peg," observed Georgie, as we turned our backs on the pine-wood and the heath, and the strip of common land, "that is the same woman we met the day you painted Mrs. Shooter's baby."
"I recognised her at once," I replied, "and am confirmed in my belief that she has known better days."
"What a dreadful man Bob Adams is."
"You must remember he believes her to be a witch, and, indeed, she did her best to make him think her one," was my charitable answer.
IF the poor creature whose reputation as a witch seems to have stood her in such wretched stead, if she, I say, had known exactly how we were situated, she might with more reason have commended our courage.
For we were living quite alone—we two, in the old Mill House—lighting our own fires, cooking our own meals, performing, in fact, the whole of our own manual labour.
After a few weeks' experience, we had been obliged to relinquish even the hope of procuring a reliable servant.
There was something against the place, which seemed to prevent our keeping a respectable domestic.
If we hoped we had secured a treasure, we either never heard from her again, or else only heard that she was sorry "she could not oblige us," or "was forced to decline the situation."
The maimed, the halt, the incompetent—girls to whom all other places were closed—came to us at first in shoals, but at last even the very outcasts refused to remain at the Mill House.
I had never before believed the country mind could be so fertile in excuses.
We, or rather I, did not yield the point without a struggle; but as there seemed little use in people entering our service merely in order to leave it immediately, I resigned myself after a time to the inevitable.
Worse trials had befallen us than serving ourselves, and if we only could have found one female willing to sleep under our roof, all other annoyances might have been overlooked.
But those nights! shall I ever forget them? shall I ever lose the memory of awakening in the darkness and the silence, and recollecting we were all alone?
I did not know what I feared; that was the worst of it.
I did not dare acknowledge to myself it was less flesh and blood I dreaded to encounter, than an indefinite something I could not grasp, or feel, or hold.
Work—I would have worked like a lodging-house drudge, cheerfully, willingly, if thereby I could have earned her sound repose!
My sleep grew fitful, my sense of hearing sharpened; between dozing and waking, I beheld strange visions and dreamed curious dreams. I could never get the ruined mill out of my sight.
Thinking to exorcise its evil influence, I sketched the place from every imaginable and unimaginable point of view, but I might as well have spared my trouble.
In the watches of the night I was there in spirit, or else standing beside the yew-trees, and seeing that arm, of which Mrs. Shooter had spoken, clutching the broken ice; that arm clothed in a sleeve of dark grey tweed.
I shall never be able to endure the sight of a dark tweed suit so long as I live.
And through all the sound of the water mingled—water rippling, water dashing, water gliding in and in over the land, water flowing swiftly, water falling over weirs.
No matter how late I sat up, no matter how far I walked, my rest was certain to be broken with some horror to which I could give no name, which scarcely had form or shape.
Terror assailed me; the touch of any living thing might have proved some comfort, some reassurance, but I could not infect my sister with my fears, and accordingly I was wont to rise from bed, and with my own heart throbbing, so that it seemed to me I could hear its beats, listen to Georgie's regular breathing, trying to comfort myself with the knowledge of her sound repose.
The thousand noises which break the stillness of the night, the rustlings of the branches, the cracking of the old woodwork, the creaking of the stairs, the banging of some door outside, the wailing of strange cats, the plunging of the water-rats—all these things affected me with an unconquerable dread.
Stealthy steps seemed to creep along the passages, soft fingers to touch the panels and try the handles of the doors.
In fancy I could see Dingley sitting in the gloomy dining-room, his brows bent, his hands in his pockets, thinking over the ruin which had been wrought; and at the very same moment I could picture the men coming through the gate carrying their ghastly burden, and bearing it beneath the porch into the marble-paved hall.
Sobbings, too, seemed sometimes to mingle with the other noises of the night, and once I could have declared I heard the crying of an infant; in fact, my sleep more resembled the wanderings of delirium than the rest of a healthy body.
Every story I had heard about the Mill House, every ghastly tale that vulgar fears or lying imagination had conjured up concerning it, used to begin to recur to me the moment darkness drew near.
Things I had laughed at, things I had ridiculed, statements I felt even too absurd for repetition, assumed importance directly the sun went down.
All this I am careful to chronicle, though aware it detracts from that personal courage to which I think I may still lay some claim, because I wish to draw a line, broad and wide and deep, between the fears which may have been creatures born but of my own imagination, and those events which certainly happened, and as certainly influenced the course of several lives.
I have been told since by persons who call themselves "practical," that irregular meals, an insufficient supply of butcher's meat, an undue quantity of tea made too strong, and partaken of always three and sometimes four times a day, were the causes of what they are pleased to term all my nervous fancies.
To this I have but to reply that Georgie's fare was the same as my own, and that Georgie's sleep was never broken, and further, that subsequent occurrences proved my fitful dreams, my troubled fancies, had been but the shadows announcing the coming of events that were facts, not fancies.
Aye! even the figure standing so still under the gloomy pine tree had its significance; the appearance which might have been mist or imagination, but was neither; the boat with muffled oars, the two oarsmen and he who steered, were all parts and parcel of a drama soon to be played out.
After restless nights, during which I was too heavy and weary not to sleep, and yet which left me almost as tired as when I lay down, I usually rose whenever daylight had fairly come.
There was one thing I could not have done, I believe; namely, go downstairs by myself in the grey twilight of morning.
Unconsciously perhaps, but most certainly, I must have felt the house held secrets, of which as yet I knew nothing, but which even in the noontide made the air oppressive, for sometimes when it was necessary for me to cross the hall, and enter the apartment where the Dingley family had been wont to assemble, I have stood in my painting-room with the handle of the door held in my fingers for some seconds before I have sufficiently mastered my dread to turn the lock, and look and see—nothing.
This is all beside my real story.
I shrink a little as the end approaches, the end which was drawing so nigh.
One morning, not long after our meeting with the witch, Bob Adams, Bill Jakes, Louisa Wisley, and the rest of the dramatis personae treated of in the last chapter—seeing the sun shining cheerily and brightly through the curtains I never of late had drawn close, I rose, and dressing hurriedly, went downstairs without awaking Georgie.
I had a set purpose in my mind; I wanted before breakfast to finish a little drawing I had begun, little in its details, though of a sufficient size, I desired to send off to Mr. Berners.
In itself the affair was the merest trifle; a magnificent poplar tree, a very steep, very picturesque wooden bridge, with foot-holds for horses upon it, a scrap of dreary canal, a once farm-house, with peaked gables, tiled roof, and diamond windows, now converted into a pair of cottages, tenanted by labourers, whose red-petticoated children supplied the needed piece of brilliant colour to the picture.
This was what I wanted to get off my mind.
The reader who has followed me so far, and who possesses any artistic instincts, will understand precisely what I mean when I say that unless I could do my work while the fit was on me, it always seemed to lack brilliancy and life.
Each detail might be accurate; with the arrangement of each colour it might be impossible to critically find a fault, and yet I knew the subtle influence was all the difference; made all the change between—may I venture to institute such a comparison?—champagne up and champagne down.
What a pother about a poplar tree! ejaculates some impatient reader.
True, my dear friend, and yet I have been only trying to exemplify why some paintings succeed, and some do not; why some books are asked for, and some left neglected on the shelves; why you make a fortune, and some other man equally clever in his own conceit dies a bankrupt.
At my birth, talent of a certain sort was vouchsafed to me, but no genius.
Had I seen less, travelled less, heard less, read less, it might be I should have imagined God had dowered me with the ability to make myself very great and very famous; but as matters stood, I knew the world and comprehended the position He had seen fit to assign me in it.
I had a gift, a somewhat adaptable gift, since my poor skill in painting enabled me to catch a likeness, to repeat the delicate tracery of delicate grasses and springing ferns, to sketch a landscape people cared to return and look upon, to portray cattle standing knee-deep in water, and make the beholder feel the day was very hot, and the animals greatly in need of the relief afforded by the stream.
Artists, great artists, have done each one of these things, and done them superlatively well.
I did them all just well enough to give pleasure, but I owe whatever of success I have achieved first, of course, to the gift heaven had bestowed, and last to the system I adopted of finishing my work while the influence of expression, scene, season, was strong upon me.
I possessed, in a word, so little genius that I had to make the most of what had been given me.
Poor singers sometimes make up in expression what they lack in voice; and so in like manner I had to try to make up in freshness what I wanted in vigour.
It is something, you understand, to be able to reproduce even a blade of grass with a dew-drop hanging on it.
Now, that was precisely what I could do; but then I dare scarcely let the dew-drop dry in reality ere transferring it.
I feel I am a poorer writer even than a painter; and yet there may be those who, reading, will understand.
So on this particular morning, having still every accessory of that poplar tree vividly before me, I arose to finish my sketch.
It was getting late in the autumn, so late that we were quite in the winter quarter, according to the signs of the weather, though still wanting more than a month of the season, if we could think the almanack correct.
At all events, the Indian summer of which I have spoken elsewhere was over, and if I wished to reproduce that which I had seen in the pleasantest time of the year, it behoved me to finish it at once.
Therefore, leaving Georgie asleep, I went down, and without entering dining or drawing room, passed straight to my studio.
Just as I had left it overnight, just without change of feature, putting to shame of course with its prosaic face my overnight fears, my morning dreams.
Through chinks in the shutters the light streamed across the room on the ashes of the wood fire which had blazed so cheerfully the preceding evening, on my easel, on Georgie's work-basket, the arm-chair I had drawn up beside the hearth, and the book I only laid down when we went to bed.
When I opened the shutters, however, something caught my eyes which was quite new, namely, a woman seated on a bench placed close to the brink of the river.
She had her back towards me, and at first I did not recognise her.
Some noise I made, however, aroused her attention, and she rose and advanced to the window.
Then I saw that, decently clad, with her grey hair combed smoothly back, with a tidy cap covering her head, the woman of the brackens stood before me.
She came forward without any hesitation, and also without hesitation I opened the window and stepped out to meet her.
"I hope you won't be offended, miss," she said, "but I came down to know if I could not help you a bit. I heard you were without a servant, and I thought you might like to have someone to light a fire and clear up a little. I am not very young, but I am strong."
I could not doubt that fact, after the burden I had seen her carry.
"Do you mean to stop altogether?" I asked, in amazement.
"No, miss, not that; but I could come for a few hours, two or three times a week. You have been very good to me, and I'd like—that is, it would be a pleasure—if I could do aught for you in return."
Prudence might have suggested some inquiry into the antecedents of a person who made such an offer; but, I confess, a long course of fire-lighting and kettle-boiling had done much to destroy that sentiment.
In fact, I was so weary of domestic labour, that I at once seized the chance of being relieved from my duties for even one morning.
Oh! the delight of being able to paint right on, without ever a thought of the impending breakfast.
Very deftly this strange hand-maiden set about her work.
Swiftly and noiselessly she laid the fires and then kindled them.
Without direction from me, she found such things as she required, and when Georgie made her appearance, everything was in order—everything we had been in the habit of doing for ourselves, and everything we had systematically left undone, completed.
"Well, this is comfortable," exclaimed my sister, after I told her what had occurred; "if this is witches' work, commend me to those ladies."
"She has been a servant almost all her life," I explained.
"How did she come to be a witch?" asked Georgie.
"I did not ask her," was my reply.
When I had finished my drawing, I thought it would be well to come to some explanation with our self-constituted domestic, and accordingly opened the proceedings by observing that I feared she would find the distance from her home an obstacle to doing our work.
"I have moved, miss," she answered. "I have got a house over at Eddingfold."
"May I inquire," I said, "how you got in this morning? I thought I locked all the gates?"
"I dare say, miss; but there are ways of getting in without coming through the gates."
"Oh! are there?"
"Yes, miss. I came across the river."
"How could you do that?"
"There is a ford just down there by that pollard oak. When the water is low it is quite easy to wade across it into your garden."
"You seem to know this place very well."
"I do, miss—few better."
"Have you lived in this immediate neighbourhood, then?"
"I have lived in this house."
"With—"
"With poor Miss Lauston."
"Then you must be—" I stopped.
I had been going to say—"that wicked old woman who drove the girl out of her mind," but I recollected myself in time, and remained silent.
"The woman that has been almost as much talked about as you ladies," she finished, not without a certain malicious emphasis. "Anybody who lives in this house is sure to get a bad name."
"Have we got a bad name?" I asked, amazed.
"Mr. Lauston has given you one, at any rate," she replied. "People do say he would give anything to get you out of the house. Perhaps you know why."
"Indeed I do not," I answered. "I offended him, certainly."
"Well, he never forgives."
"I thought he and you were friends."
"No, miss. I am afraid of him; and he—I used to think he was a bit afraid of me; but we were never friends."
"Yet you lived in his service for many years."
"Not for love of him—be sure of that. It is a long story, and I will tell it to you someday, perhaps."
"If you lived here for so many years, you must know whether there is any truth in the stories which are told about this house," I said, after a pause.
"What stories?"
"Well, people say it is haunted."
"And what do you say, miss?"
"I do not know what to say."
"And neither do I," was the answer. "If there are ghosts, they never did harm to me; and I misdoubt whether anybody could live almost alone in a big house like this without hearing queer noises and being frightened by strange sounds."
"Then you never saw anything?" I persisted.
"I did not say that, miss; but I have always tried to think I was mistaken."
"What did you see?"
"Perhaps I had better not tell you; but there, likely as not, it was my fancy. One night, between sleeping and waking, something seemed to force me to rise and look out of the window. It was a winter's night, but not dark, for there was a bit of a moon, and frosty besides."
"Go on," I said.
"Well, miss, as I looked out, a man seemed to walk right, across the yard, to those yew trees—they were not so high or so thick then as they are now."
"Yes."
"When he got to them, he turned his face, so that I could see it—turned, and looked up at the moon; then he lifted up his right hand as if in a sort of despair, and plunged right into the water."
"And what did you do?"
"I did nothing, miss. I could not even cry out, for I knew it was Mr. Dingley, and that Mr. Dingley was dead."
"Oh! you knew Mr. Dingley, then?"
"Yes; I had often seen him."
I went to my portfolio, and took out the drawing which had so surprised our landlord.
"Was Mr. Dingley anything like this?" I asked, laying it before her.
She looked at the sketch—then at me, and I knew.
"I have said nothing to my sister," I remarked, and we spoke of the matter no more.
A FORTNIGHT passed—and so far from Anne—as she asked us to call her—slackening in her efforts, she seemed to strain every nerve to please.
For Georgie, she appeared to have conceived a feeling amounting to affection. I could see how her face lighted up at sight of my pretty sister—how her eyes used to follow every movement of the lithe, graceful figure.
One day I asked if she reminded her of Miss Lauston; but she shook her head.
"Your sister is full of life and spirits, miss; but my poor young lady never had even a chance of being happy. She was very beautiful, and had a timid, tender, winning way with her, but she was not like Miss Georgie. She was sly from a child," went on Anne, after a moment's hesitation; "the simplest thing she would try to hide; and she took after her uncle in one thing—you could not believe a word she said. She was far more like him than like her father."
"You knew her father?"
"Father and mother both. I would not have stayed with Mr. Lauston, if it had not been for love of Miss Clara's dead mother."
"Was she nice?"
"She was an angel, miss;" and unbidden tears came into the eyes I had seen gleam with so evil a light, and the woman turned away abruptly, as if ashamed of her emotion.
Later on in the day, when I was working at the landscape, in which she, now so different a figure, formed so principal an object, and Georgie was absent upon a shopping expedition, Anne came and asked if she could speak to me for a few minutes.
"I have thought and thought about it, miss," she said, when I laid down my brush, "and loath as I am to trust my secret to anybody, I can see no way out of my trouble except to tell you."
The words were not complimentary, but I have never been over-ready to take offence, so I answered—
"If you do not want to tell me your secret, you have only to say how I can help you in your trouble, and I will try to do it."
"Ah! miss, if rich folks was all like you, there would be less heart-burning than there is."
"I do not think heart-burning will ever cease out of the world," I answered; "but, at any rate, we need not discuss that matter, for I am not rich, Perhaps, however, I can help you."
She did not say anything more for a minute, then she broke out
"Miss, when you asked me the first morning if I meant to stay here altogether, I said 'No,' and it was not quite true. I could have stayed, and I want to stay."
"Has that anything to do with your secret?" I asked.
"Yes, miss, all," was the answer. "That morning I could not just make up my mind; but now you and Mr. Lauston are two, and I want to tell you the whole story."
"Then Mr. Lauston has to do with the matter?"
"I'll begin at the beginning—I'll tell you about it as straight as I can.
"When I was a little over thirty, it so happened that Mrs. Lauston—that is, Mr. Frederick Lauston's wife—was in want of a housemaid. She had one little girl, Miss Clara; the place was a good place and a light one.
"I had not been in good places before.
"I had not lived with kind mistresses.
"Mrs. Lauston was an angel; and her husband, who had been out in India and made a lot of money there, was a different gentleman indeed from the Mr. Lauston you know.
"First as housemaid, then as maid, I lived and travelled with them.
"They resided mostly abroad; and it was at Nice my master died; my mistress never held up her head after his death, and six months later, Miss Clara and me came alone to England, to Mr. Lauston.
"He asked me to stop on, and I did.
"He told me his brother had met with great losses before his death, and that Miss Clara would be poor unless he could manage to put something by for her.
"We had not been with him long before he said he must give up his house in town; that Mr. Dingley, who used often to come to his house, had committed suicide, and let him in for some great loss; that nobody would stay at the Mill, and that he must go himself and live down at Maytree, in order to get the bad name off the place.
"He was always just what you have seen him, hard to believe, harder not to believe."
I nodded as she paused for confirmation of her statement. She had described Mr. Lauston to a nicety.
"Well, we came down.
"Miss Clara had a governess then, but you may be sure she did not stay long.
"Mr. Lauston did not stay long either.
"He was said to live here, but he did not.
"I always think he saw something that gave him a turn, for once when he came in out of the garden, he crossed over to the sideboard in the dining-room where I was laying the cloth, and drank off near upon a tumbler full of raw spirits.
"It was said he 'bested' the Dingleys, and that Mr. Dingley could not rest in his grave.
"At last there was nobody left in the place but Miss Clara and me, and a dull life it was.
"I was not afraid of the ghosts myself, because I knew I had done nothing to anger anybody, but still it was lonesome, awful.
"Miss Clara was not like you or Miss Georgie. There was not a bit of life in her. She had been kept down ever since her mother's death. She was not educated as a young lady ought to be; she had no pretty dresses; she had no one of her own rank to speak to. It was not her fault, being poor, but I do think Mr. Lauston grudged her even food and shelter.
"Except the wind and the rain, nothing seemed much to please her.
"The finest morning that ever broke never made her look a bit brighter; but let a regular gale be blowing, and she would dance about the house and clap her hands, and go singing upstairs and down.
"Many a time I felt frightened to see her!
"Well, she grew up; we had been here six years, and there came a change over her. She was brisker and kinder, and seemed to have outgrown her fondness for listening to all the stupid stories that were told about the mill and the river, and reading queer books concerning ghosts and such like.
"She used to talk about what we would do when we left this place, 'for I am not going to stay here forever, Nan,' she often said.
"'But where are we to go?' I asked her, and then she would make answer—
"'Where, oh! anywhere; we will seek our fortunes.'
"My poor dear, she did seek a terrible fortune.
"After a while, however, all her spirits forsook her, she began to mope, and lost her appetite. Her mother had died of consumption, and I thought that was what ailed her, and begged Mr. Lauston to let her have change of air.
"I should not wish to wrong anybody, miss, but I do think he hoped she would die. He had never seemed able to bear the sight of her!
"However, he took her away, went with her himself, which I thought very odd, to some place in Wales.
"She was away five weeks, but she looked worse than ever when she came back.
"'I do not think she is long for this world,' Mr. Lauston said to me. 'Be sure she wants for nothing,' and he put five sovereigns in my hand and started straight off to London.
"I went into the drawing-room after he left, and found her standing near one of the windows.
"It all came upon me like a flash; the dreadful 'all' that was the matter with her.
"'Oh! Miss Clara—Miss Clara!' I cried out, but she only said in answer—
"'Keep it from my uncle. Help me how to keep it from him.'
"You would scarcely believe it, I suppose, miss, but first and last she never parted with any of her secret she could hide from me. She said she was married, but I did not believe her.
"I begged and prayed her to give me her confidence, but she would not.
"She fell into a dreadful weak way after the child was born, and I was at my wits' end to know what to do with her and the baby. She would not hear of it being sent away, and I did not dare to face Mr. Lauston's anger, if he knew of her disgrace.
"Miss Clara had money—whoever the father was, seemed to have thought about that—and so one day I trimmed up a little basket, and pinned a twenty-pound note inside a fine cashmere cloak, and made believe a child had been left in the porch.
"I wrote to Mr. Lauston about it, said I had taken it in and was doing for it; that poor Miss Clara—who got no better—seemed to have a fancy for the little thing, and might I keep it so long as she lived.
"Mr. Lauston came down and had a look at the clothes, and basket, and the few lines we had written in a feigned hand, saying, 'whoever took care of the infant would be well paid for doing so.'
"Then he hummed and hawed a little, but ended by putting the twenty pounds in his purse, and saying that he supposed it could not do any harm to give it shelter for a little while.
I do not know how it was—whether some suspicion crossed him or not, but when we thought we had got rid of him, and over the worst of our troubles, he came back, and let himself in by the garden-gate, and went quietly up to Miss Clara's room, where she was nursing the child.
"When she saw him she gave a scream that brought me upstairs. I do not know what had passed between them, but as I crossed the threshold I heard her say—
"'I am married, uncle—I am, indeed!' and then he struck her and cursed her, and called her vile names, and snatched the child out of her arms, and pushed me out of the room, and locked the door, leaving the poor creature alone.
"He was like a madman. I thought he would have killed her and the child too.
"He had flung the key of Miss Clara's room in the river, but I found another that would unlock the door and went to her.
"She was terribly ill after that. She had fever. We were obliged to have a doctor to her. Mr. Lauston brought one down from London; and, I suppose, told him some story of his own, for the gentleman always spoke as if the baby was dead.
"But I knew it was not dead.
"He had sent it to the workhouse. Poor Miss Clara got better in health at last, but her mind was quite gone.
"I wanted to take care of her—for she was harmless as a child; but he said, 'No; if I had looked after her properly before, all this trouble would never have happened,' and so she was taken off to an asylum, where she died about six months ago."
"What a terrible story!" I exclaimed. "And the child—what became of it?"
"That is what I am coming to, miss," answered the woman, wiping her eyes.
"At first, Mr. Lauston was for turning me out on the world without a shilling, except the few pounds I had saved out of my wages; but I said I would not let him have everything his own way. I had lost my health in his service I was getting old, I would scarce be able to keep another place, and I told him he must give me enough to hold body and soul together.
"After a good deal of trouble, he agreed to allow me seven shillings a week, and I was to keep a silent tongue about Miss Clara, and the disgrace she had brought upon him.
"I went up to London first, but after I had been there for a while I began to think about my old mistress, and her poor daughter, and the little child, and so I came back here, and it entered into my mind that I would get the baby out of the workhouse, and try to do for it myself.
"I was afraid of Mr. Lauston knowing, so I put the child to nurse, and paid for it."
"Out of the seven shillings?"
"Yes, miss. At first it was not such hard work. I got a little employment—cleaning, and such like, and I had the few pounds put by; but as the child got older, I was forced to pay more for him, and the notion was put about that I had ill-treated my young mistress, and people would not have me in their houses, and I got poorer, and poorer, and poorer.
"It is strange, isn't it, how folks all seem to think that everybody that is poor must be wicked except themselves?
"I know that as I got poorer everybody almost said I grew wickeder.
"Squire Hartrey, who is not a bad sort of gentleman, let me have a cottage rent free, for keeping the stray cattle out of his young plantations, and what with living there all by myself, and the very children hooting me, I seemed to get like one apart.
I could hardly keep life in me sometimes; but I thought I'd struggle on for the sake of the boy. I could not take him to live with me up on the heath because the children would have frightened him, or done him an injury, so a short time ago I moved to Eddingfold.
"I thought out all I would do that night after I met you on the common. I had guessed who you were before, and I knew that you could get no servant to stop in this house."
"You have not finished all you were going to say," I remarked, as she paused and hesitated.
"No, miss. I do not know why it is that Mr. Lauston has been making inquiry about the child, but he told me to see if it was living or dead.
"He was so eager that I took fright—he always frightened me; and the story I made up was that the boy had been adopted, and nobody knew anything more about him.
"This morning he sends me a letter, saying he can't afford to pay the seven shillings a week any longer."
"But he is a rich man, is he not?"
"I don't think it. He had always too many ways for his money to be very rich. He was a fast-living gentleman in my time, and from all I hear he is living fast now."
"And what do you want me to do?" I asked.
"The house is large enough, miss; if you could only give me and the child shelter and food, I would work or you for nothing, and I would bless you on my bended knees."
"I will think the matter over," I answered.
As the woman reached the door, she turned and said:
"It is a strange story, miss, is it not?"
"So strange from first to last that I cannot, at the moment, make anything of it," was my reply.
FROM the time we went to the Mill House, it had always been my habit to walk almost every evening in the garden, sometimes with Georgie for a companion, but more frequently alone.
What I desired to do was to cultivate such an acquaintance with the effects of twilight and water as might enable me to produce a satisfactory picture.
I may say at once I have never yet succeeded in doing so—the sadness always overpowers the solemnity—the gloom of the coming night is greater than the tender tones of the expiring day.
It may be that I learned something useful to me, though not the precise lesson I desired to master.
At all events, whenever the evening was fairly fine, I paced the garden paths slowly, watching and thinking as the evening closed and the darker shadows stole on.
Beside the stream which flowed from the old mill there grew a thick tangle of shrub and parasite.
Even in the daytime one could scarcely distinguish where the ivy began and the laurels ended; where the barberries had their roots and the rhododendrons fought with clustering briony and the fatal convolvulus for life; but when twilight came the whole corner of the bridge resolved itself into one dark mass of dense foliage.
Two or three times on the evening after Anne told me Miss Lauston's story, I fancied I heard a stir and movement amongst this greenery, that when I stopped to listen I felt something more animate than the leaves was moving in the cover.
Each time I passed I gave the boughs a shake, so strong was the fancy upon me, and at last I parted the branches, and thrust my arm amongst the tangled creepers.
As I did so, something rushed out, so swiftly, so suddenly, that I started back affrighted.
Something soft and cold touched my cheek. Something brushed my dress.
Something lithe and shadowy flitted between me and the imperfect twilight in the open garden beyond, and then was gone.
There was a splash as if a water-rat had left its hole; there was a sound as of the breaking of a few rotten twigs, and then I knew whatever it might have been which had lain perdu was gone.
For a minute I felt sick and giddy; for a minute sight seemed to leave my eyes; then my strength returned, and I fled into the house, determined that never again, never would I wander out save when the sun was high, and each object as clear as the noon-day.
"What a simpleton I have been," I thought, "to go out evening after evening in the twilight, and leave these doors unfastened, Anybody or anything might have slipped in."
A rational reflection, and yet my mind misgave me—that it was no body and no thing locks could exclude I dreaded.
What was the secret of the Mill House? What was the mystery which surrounded it?
Between sleeping and waking, as I lay that night in bed, I tried to piece together the various stories I had heard, to make a connected whole of the disjointed fragments.
All in vain; the Dingleys mixed themselves up with Clara Lauston, and she and her boy kept watch and ward over the ruined mill.
In the darkness I could still see the broken wheel, the rotten woodwork, the dreary procession bearing Mr. Dingley through the grey light of morning home, and then I must have fallen asleep, for I imagined I was in the drawing-room below, looking at a face pressed close up against the window; a poor, pale, haggard woman's face, with a pinched hungry expression.
A chilliness seemed to pervade the atmosphere; the strange light of dreams was before my eyes, and I woke suddenly, with the words, "Nan, Nan," ringing in my ears.
Again I fell asleep, and again I dreamt of the pale face pressed up against the glass; this time, however, an unseen hand unfastened the window catch, and opened the sash wide for the woman to enter.
Then I could see there were two figures—one, that of the female, clad in garments dripping wet; the other, that of the man clothed in a suit of dark grey tweed.
I must at this time have either fallen into some great abyss of slumber, or fainted where I lay, for I heard no more, and saw no more, till I woke with the cold light of a winter's morning shining in upon my bed.
IT was evening on Christmas Day.
We had kept that festival in sober and orthodox fashion, thanking the Almighty for all the mercies He had granted to us, left almost destitute, and relishing the good fare provided for our feast all the more because a desolate little child and an elderly woman, on whom fortune had not smiled, were safe and sheltered, and happy beneath our roof.
Some may smile when I say it seemed as though a blessing had entered with the pair—as though the old house lost some of its grimness when the woman, fast growing so bitter against the world, so at odds with her fellows, cast aside with her painful poverty the burden and the repression of years.
Often I asked myself, beholding her moving cheerfully about the rooms, "Can this be the same human being who scowled not long ago at sight of Georgie's bright face, who was mocked by the children, and insulted by that man, who trailed her bundle of brackens wearily along the winding road, and whose shoulders were bowed by the weight of the load she bore across them?"
As for the Mill House, though the dark days were come, it looked brighter than I had ever seen it. Fires kindled by willing hands burned in the grates—not a room seemed lonely or uninhabited. Where ghostly steps had flitted was heard the pattering of a child's restless feet, the ringing sound of a child's laughter. It was little human fingers that now touched the panels, and rattled the handles of the doors. It was something very full of life indeed that played at bo-peep up the stairs, and along the corridors, and in the hall, which had seemed so silent and ghastly.
The smell of damp and mould was banished even from every cupboard, and throughout the house there was not only a sense of occupation, but a savoury odour of generous fare.
As a rule, the smell of cooking is not one perhaps to be desired, but after a lengthened diet, scarcely too luxurious for the strictest observer of Lent, Georgie and I were not above rejoicing in the goodly scents which saluted our nostrils as we crossed the hall.
We had been asked to spend our Christmas in Yorkshire, but there were reasons why we decided to keep the holiday-time at home.
"Next year, perhaps," remarked Georgie; "but really the house seems so bright and pleasant now, I don't think I shall ever care to leave it."
Yes, there was life about the house at last.
We had dogs and cats and pigeons, and a goat, the ducks Georgie once longed for, and a goodly assortment of hens of all ages.
Two or three men thrown out of work by the season called to know if we could not give them a job, and I had seized the opportunity to have the garden trimmed up a little, the rotten wood cut out of the trees, the parasites grubbed up, and the rank luxuriance of the evergreens lopped.
It was bad taste, perhaps, but I could not endure those thickets of sodden greenery. In vain Georgie expostulated when she beheld long wreaths of ivy floating away down stream. I had memories I never meant to share with her, of abject terrors, of horrors to which I could give no name.
For the future, all about the place should be bright and open and cheerful.
If I could have put gas in every room, the house would nightly have been illuminated, but there was no gas nearer than the station.
"The house is like a changed place," said Anne. "When Miss Clara and me lived here, I used sometimes to feel as if no churchyard could be duller and sadder than this kitchen; and now, in the evenings, with Miss Georgie at the piano, and the child running in and out, it seems hard to remember the place ever had a bad name, or that the Dingleys ever were turned out of it."
We were at the moment standing at the door giving on the back-yard. I had opened it to let the dogs out, and remained looking at the stars which were twinkling clear and bright.
"Winter is come at last, Miss," said Anne, taking down a towel which had been hanging on the line. "This is stiff as a board. It wouldn't surprise me if there was ice on the river by morning. The wind has been blowing up from the north all day."
It had. I felt it then cold and keen on my forehead; and as Anne stooped to pat one of the dogs, I stepped across the space intervening between the house and the water, and looked over the darkling river and the long fields beyond.
I do not know of what I had been thinking, of how far away fancy had carried me, when there was a smothered exclamation from Anne and a low frightened howl from the dogs.
Turning instantly, I saw the figure of a man disappear beneath the yew-trees; then there came a splash, as of some heavy body being thrown into the water, while at the same moment, from far down the stream, there came a wild, piercing shriek, followed by the words, "Nan, Nan."
"What is it?—what on earth is it?" I asked.
"Come in, Miss; come in!" cried the woman, laying a trembling hand on my arm.
I had recovered myself by this time.
"No, Anne; I must know what it is," I answered. "Some poor creature may have fallen into the river."
"Aye, Miss; but not tonight," was the answer.
But I could not be satisfied.
The natural always fights against belief in the supernatural; and I felt confident that shriek, that cry had been uttered by a living being in deadly anguish.
I ran down to the river, and called in answer; but no sound returned to me save the wailing of the wind.
For half an hour at least I and Anne and the dogs—the latter creeping after us reluctantly with tails drooping and ears slouched—walked backwards and forwards along the old towing-path. We lit lanterns, and shot their gleams over the water; but it went rippling on—ever on—silent and mysterious to the sea.
"I thought we had done with all that," I remarked, as we re-entered the house once more; but Anne only shook her head in answer.
That night I could not rest; I lay tossing from side to side. If I fell asleep, it was only for an instant—only to rind myself in some terrible peril, from which I awoke with a cry and a start.
At last I could bear it no longer, so rose and went downstairs with the intention of finding a book. Georgie had been reading a new novel in the drawing-room; and I entered that apartment accordingly to get the volume which I knew lay on the centre table.
As I did so the candle I carried blew out, and the door slammed behind me; the window opposite was wide open, and I could perceive by the light of the stars a figure standing under the verandah, which was like that of a woman clad in dripping garments.
If my life had depended upon flight, I must have died; for my feet seemed rooted to the ground. If I had been turned to stone I could not have felt less capable of movement than in the first horror of that sight.
Very slowly the woman entered, and moved towards me.
Though there was no moon, a light streamed across the apartment, and showed me the same pale haggard face I had beheld in my dream pressed close against the glass. At each step I could see wet dripping from her garments, oozing from her shoes.
Beckoning me to follow, she passed into the hall; whether I in my flight opened the door, or it opened with another gust of wind, I cannot tell; all I know is, we were in the hall—I was ascending the stairs after her.
I was treading the passage above with tread as light and soft as hers.
Turning her head to see if I was still close at hand, she passed into a small room full of our boxes, and of lumber belonging to the house. Here she came to a pause, and looked at me pitifully.
Still the strange light—that light such as we see in dreams; still that sensation of a horror, too mighty to be real.
In one corner of the room there was a cupboard, which Georgie and I had examined when we took possession, and found empty.
This cupboard the woman opened, still keeping her sorrowful eyes fastened on me, then softly, noiselessly, she raised the bottom shelf, and disclosed a hollow beneath it.
Then there was a great crash.
Something fell, and utter darkness closed around.
When I came to my senses, Georgie was standing on one side of my bed, and Anne on the other. Georgie had been crying, and Anne was looking at me with grave inquiring eyes. The room seemed full to suffocation of a mingled odour of burnt feathers, eau de cologne, and vinegar.
"Open the window," I gasped, and Georgie threw it wide.
In swept the crisp frosty air, bringing strength with its very breath.
I struggled up on my pillow and said, "Now what is it?" then all at once memory gave me back what I had for the moment lost, and I added, "Oh, I recollect!"
"You must have been walking in your sleep, Miss," said Anne, with a meaning glance. "We found you in the lumber-room lying on the floor, with a picture-frame a top of you."
"I should like a cup of coffee," was my somewhat irrelevant observation. "Georgie, would you make it for me?"
Always ready, always active, before the words were well spoken, my sister was off to fetch what I wanted; then said Anne:
"What ever, Miss, were you doing in that room?"
I could not tell her.
I could not then.
All the answer I made was:
"You know that old cupboard in the corner; go to it, will you, and see whether the bottom shelf lifts up. If it does, look if there is anything in the hollow beneath."
In about ten minutes she returned, holding a small box in her hand.
"It was Miss Clara's," she said, all of a tremble, "and I have opened it, Miss, and there are her marriage lines, and her wedding-ring and all, poor dear—poor, poor dear!"
"Then she was married," I said.
"Aye, poor soul, and to the son of some great gentleman. Here are letters from him. How ever did you come to know about it, Miss?"
"Anne, if I do not leave this house, I shall die. I cannot tell you what I saw last night. I cannot," was my irrelevant answer.
But in an hour or two I was better and calmer, able to rise and sit before the bright wood fire, while I thought out the mystery of the Mill House.
"There has been a wrong somewhere," I considered, "and shall I faint and falter because it seems to have fallen to me to put it right? No, I will see it out. No matter what may happen, I will see it out."
Just then there was a ring at the hall door. Georgie answered it, Anne being busy.
"A gentleman," she explained, afterwards, "wanted to know if we had seen anything of a lady about twenty-five years of age, middle height, slight figure, dressed in grey, very pale face, long light hair, not quite in her right senses. He had heard she was somewhere in the neighbourhood. Of course I told him we had seen nothing of such a person, and he went away."
This inquiry decided my plans.
Before post-time on that afternoon, I wrote a letter to the "great person," whose name was mentioned often in the love-letters, short, sad, and passionate, which had lain so long in the hidden box.
I told him I supposed his son was dead, but that there still lived a little boy who would never have left the shelter of the workhouse but for the devotion of an old servant, herself most miserably poor.
I said there were circumstances connected with the case I could not understand, but which I implored him to investigate, and I added that till I received a reply to my letter, I should not speak about the matter to anyone, or take any steps to place the boy in his rightful position.
Anne carried the letter to the post-office, and evening again came on.
Night closed, but I could not bear to be alone; therefore Miss Lauston's faithful servant slept on a sofa in my room, and the little child with Georgie.
And so for the next night, and for many more nights while the frost grew keener and the wind colder; then just before dawn, I raised myself on my elbow, and said—
"Anne, are you asleep?"
For answer, she at once arose and came to my side.
"I think," I began, "I comprehend the matter at last. Mr. Lauston's brother did not die poor; his daughter must have been an heiress, and her boy would have succeeded to her money—Mr. Lauston has spent it.
"He wanted her to die," I went on; "she was not dead when he told you she had died. The man who came the other day belonged to the asylum. My mind is not very clear, still I can piece the facts together in my mind—the shriek—that wild, wild night—the boat with men who pulled with muffled oars—the presence haunting this house—oh! no, she was not dead!"
"But now, Miss," sobbed Anne, "she couldn't have been living when she passed through bolts and bars—for though you thought the window was open, I found it close shut—when she showed you where her secret lay; when she came to save her boy. I know the minute she died, Miss; may Heaven forgive me my awful cowardice—on Christmas night, when Dingley walked underneath the yew trees and you heard her crying out, 'Nan, Nan.'"
I have little more to tell. On the New Year's morning, stiff and cold, the men who found the body bore her to our house.
There she lay till after the inquest, with white upturned face, with dripping garments, weary and worn, poor creature; but quiet and at rest at last.
Afterwards it transpired she had escaped from the asylum more than once, and sheltered herself in the half-sunken barge; about the Mill House—aye, in the very mill itself.
There were found scraps of bread, bones, raw potatoes, apples, all sorts of odds and ends we had missed from time to time, and blamed the rats for taking.
The news was telegraphed to London and to the "great gentleman," whose son loved and married the poor lady.
Within twelve hours news was returned to us that Mr. Lauston had committed suicide, and Miss Lauston's husband—himself at last the great gentleman—was standing beside the body of the wife he had long believed dead.
My theory proved correct: the boy was heir to the money his mother had been kept out of, and heir to the vast estates his father now owned.
"Her uncle told me she was dead," moaned the widower; "the first thing I did when I returned to England was to try and find her. I never knew she had a child. I had not the faintest idea she herself was living."
FOR the rest, do you wish to know what became of the house by the "Haunted River"?
We hesitated about it; but at last, in solemn conclave, decided to right, so far as we could, the evil wrought, by devoting the place to some work of charity.
If, therefore, reader, you ever go to Maytree, and ask for The Old Mill House, you will find, when you have walked down the lane described in an early chapter, a board setting forth that here is the "Clara Refuge for Orphan Children."
And within the fence you can at certain hours hear the gleeful shouts of little creatures who have never known what it is to be sad and comfortless, sick and lonely; but who are tended and cared for, and taught and loved by those less than kin perhaps, but more, far more than kind.
Near at hand, where stood the ruined mill, is a beautiful church. Beside it the water splashes, above it the pine trees wave.
To God and His destitute people the estate has been dedicated, and in the once desolate rooms of the old Mill House, children sleep tranquilly where their elders were once afraid to rest.
For me?—for us?
Well, I live almost entirely abroad. I have as much money as I require for my modest needs. An old, very old, woman looks after my small household.
At intervals, a tall stripling, who will soon leave Eton, runs over to criticise the latest work lying on the easel of one whom he styles his "dear Aunt Peg."
He is a good lad, and a clever; but sometimes Anne and I, after he has gone, look at each other and sigh, remembering the mother who went distraught; who died, no one can ever exactly say how, in some depth of the Haunted River.
But Georgie is happy.
If ever a woman was blessed in husband, children, home, worldly means, worldly consideration, the goodwill of the rich, the thankful word of the poor, it is my beautiful sister, who, two years after we left that ill-omened Mill House, married the "great gentleman," and who still loves me just as much as she did on that summer morning when she had her wilful way about travelling to Maytree in order to view Donaldson's cottage.
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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